WAITINGROOM is pleased to present “Sew,” a solo presentation by Tokyo-based artist Rikako Kawauchi (b. 1990, Tokyo, Japan) at Liste Art Fair Basel 2026 (Booth #76). Since childhood, Kawauchi has been fascinated by food and bodily functions, feeling discomfort toward ingesting, digesting, and excreting. This led her to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s “The Raw and the Cooked” and to expand her line-based practice across painting, drawing, wire, neon, and stone sculpture to examine bodily transformation. Consistently placing “line” at the core of expression, Kawauchi describes her attempt as “capturing elusive bodies and invisible movements of thought within lines.” Her presentation at Liste Art Fair Basel 2026 brings together embroidery, drawing, painting, and sculpture within a single installation. Through the line-based language of embroidery, the presentation explores the boundaries between the interior and exterior of the body, as well as between protection and invasion.

Left: It looks like it still has plenty , 2026, embroidery, thread on fabric, wooden frame,
1303 × 970 × 50 mm
Right: Sew, 2025, oil on canvas, 455 × 530 mm

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Venue: Messe Basel, Hall 1.1 (Basel, Switzerland)

VIP Preview (by invitation only)
Monday, June 15, 11am–6pm

Opening (free entry)
Monday, June 15, 6–8pm

Public Days
Tuesday, June 16, 12–8pm
Wednesday, June 17, 12–8pm
Thursday, June 18, 12–8pm
Friday, June 19, 12–8pm
Saturday, June 20, 12–8pm
Sunday, June 21, 11am–4pm

More Info:https://www.liste.ch/en
Booth No. : #76
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Born in Tokyo in 1990. She completed her graduate studies at Tama Art University, Graduate School of Art and Design, Department of Painting, in 2017. Recent major exhibitions include Rikako Kawauchi x Edward Dwurnik “THE HEAD” (2026, Edward Dwurnik Foundation, Warsaw, Poland), solo exhibition “The Blade of the Forest Within” (2026, Gana Art Hannam / Gana Art Namsan, Seoul, Korea), solo exhibition “Humans and Tigers” (2025, WAITINGROOM, Tokyo, Japan), solo exhibition “The shape of water hardens into stone.” (2025, Kurobe City Art Museum, Toyama), solo exhibition “Inner Vector: 11, 72, 2154” (2025, Beyond Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan), group exhibition “5th Anniversary Exhibition Plastic Utopia: Our New Ecosystem” (2025, Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art, Aomori), solo exhibition “Paintings & Drawings – Food, animals, organs, plants, bodies, etc, everything outside me is everywhere in the air. I breathe them in, I breathe them out.” (2024, Van der Grinten Galerie, Cologne, Germany), solo exhibition “Under the sun” (2024, agnès b. Galerie Boutique, Tokyo), group exhibition “A Personal View of Japanese Contemporary Art: Takahashi Ryutaro Collection” (2024, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo), solo exhibition “The Voice of the Soul” (2023, ERA GALLERY, Milan), group exhibitions “Body, Love, Gender” (2023, Gana Art Center, Seoul, Korea), group exhibition “WORLDS IN BALANCE: ART IN JAPAN FROM THE POSTWAR TO THE PRESENT” (2023, Okura Museum of Art, Tokyo), and group exhibition “10th Anniversary Exhibition: New Horizon—From History to the Future” (2023, Arts Maebashi, Gunma). She also received the Kenjiro Hosaka Prize at the 1st CAF Award (2014), the SHISEIDO ART EGG Prize at SHISEIDO ART EGG (2015), the Yuki Terase Prize at the TERRADA ART AWARD 2021, and the Grand Prize (VOCA Prize) at VOCA 2022: The Vision of Contemporary Art—New Perspectives in Painting (2022). Her works are in the collections of 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Albertina Museum, Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art, Arts Maebashi, and Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, among others.

“Sew,” the presentation for Liste Art Fair Basel 2026, creates a fluid space in which the boundaries between the interior and exterior of the body blur ambiguously through the motif of a spider web. Centered around the large-scale embroidery work House of the Mouth (2026), the presentation organically combines the ball-shaped sculpture Beating (2026), the painting Sew (2025), and multiple drawings, composing the entire booth as a single installation.

House of the Mouth (2026) is a large-scale embroidery based on the motif of a spider web, symbolizing the inseparability of inside and outside. The work presents the web as an extension of the body. Spun from threads emerging from the body, spider webs function simultaneously as home, trap, and site of predation—an externalized organ or an internalized shelter. Within this intricate web structure unfolds a rich mythological world in which plants, animals, and human-like forms coexist and transform. Drawing in part on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s writings on mythological structures, Kawauchi is interested in figures that traverse established boundaries and mediate apparent oppositions. The spider, which appears in various mythological traditions as a liminal and transformative being, becomes a vehicle through which distinctions such as nature and culture, inside and outside, or self and other are returned to a state of fertile ambiguity.

In the sculpture Beating (2026), a ball symbolizes movement and life. Drawing on a Chinese belief that life exists only while the ball is bouncing, as well as legends in which an object comes alive when air is breathed into it, this motif reflects cycles of life. For the artist, the ball embodies life, the human figure, the wind, and at the same time overlaps with the heart, the origin of the living, moving body.

Sew (2025) addresses the body’s permeability, depicting how external elements enter bodily circulation. Kawauchi likens sewing—where front and back threads form a single entity through the needle’s passage—to this circulation, mapping it onto the structure of a web.

These works traverse binary oppositions such as inside and outside, body and mind, self and other, and nature and culture, thereby questioning anthropocentric perspectives. Building on the lineage of women artists who have explored the body as a central theme—such as Kiki Smith, Annette Messager, and Louise Bourgeois—this presentation reconsiders the relationship between body and environment from a contemporary perspective, framing the spider’s web as either an “externalized organ of the body” or an “inhabited dwelling taken into the interior.”

Left: grab, 2026, watercolor and pencil on paper, 257 × 182 mm
Center: Being able to relax with you, 2023, watercolor and pencil on paper, 410 × 318mm
Right: In my hands, 2026, watercolor and pencil on paper, 410 × 318 mm