WAITINGROOM (Tokyo) is pleased to present “Please Don’t Disturb”, a solo exhibition by Rikako Kawauchi at CADAN YURAKUCHO. Kawauchi works with a wide variety of materials, including paintings, drawings, wire, and neon tubing, all centered on the fundamental theme of the body. In recent years, she has also become known for her colorful paintings of motifs such as animals and parts of the human body that appear symbolically in myths from various regions along the themes of digestion, excretion, and cooking.

At this exhibition, the artist will present a new series of paintings featuring a hotel and the items placed there, along with neon works using antique furniture as pedestals. Kawauchi sees the hotel as a temporary home, where she finds both intimacy, as “my” home and otherness as “someone else’s” at the same time. We hope that visitors will enjoy this new series that overlaps this ambiguous boundary between self and other with the body.“Room 1925”, 2024, oil on canvas, 455 x 530 mm

Born in Tokyo, Japan in 1990. Graduated from Tama Art University with the Master’s degree in 2017. Currently lives and works in Tokyo. Taking her interest in food as her starting point, her works are focused on the body and thought, self and others, the indistinctness of their boundaries, and the mythological world in which digestion, excretion, eating, and the body created from it are the starting points for the creation of the world. In 2014, while a student at Tama Art University, she received the Kenjiro Hosaka Award at the CAF ART AWARD 2014, a publicly-collected group exhibition, and in 2015 she received the SHISEIDO ART EGG Award (Grand Prize) at the Shiseido Art Egg, a program for up-and-coming artists. In 2021, she selected as a finalist for the “TERRADA ART AWARD 2021” and received the Yuki Terase Prize; in 2022, she received the VOCA Award, the grand prize, for the “VOCA Exhibition 2022: Prospects for Contemporary Art – New Artists on the Plane”. Recent exhibitions include “Under the sun” (agnès b. galerie boutique, Tokyo), “A Personal View of Japanese Contemporary Art: Takahashi Ryutaro Collection” (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo) in 2024, “Even the pigments in paints were once stones” (WAITINGROOM, Tokyo), “The Voice of Soul” (ERA GALLERY, Milan, Italy), “New Horizon: Vision of the Future” (Arts Maebashi, Gunma) in 2023, “Lines” (VAN DER GRINTEN GALLERY, Cologne, Germany) in 2022, and others. Her major collections include Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Aichi, Japan.

A hotel room is an intimate space.
It is invisible from the outside, just like inside my own body.
It is not one’s home, but just like a home, each person who stays in the room creates his or her own space there.
Tomorrow, someone will spend their own time there, and the items in the room will be arranged or disarranged accordingly.
In this sense, a hotel room is a temporary home.
I wonder how someone spent his or her time in that private room, in an ambiguity between sleep and waking.
And how would someone else spend the next day?
When I receive the key to the room, I feel a closeness to the items within in; but, upon checking out, a sudden distance forms.
This fleeting intimacy mirrors the way my own organs function within my body– at times, they feel deeply connected, yet at other moments, they seem entirely beyond my control.

Rikako Kawauchi

This exhibition conducts the sale of works on an application basis.
Please inquire with the staff at the venue and submit your application directly, or contact us via email at info@waitingroom.jp.
We also accept applications by email.

During this exhibition, The Third Gallery Aya (Osaka) will present a solo exhibition by Eiko Yamazawa at CADAN YURAKUCHO Space M, and WAITINGROOM and The Third Gallery Aya will present a group exhibition by Rikako Kawauchi and Mima Akasaki.

“YAMAZAWA Eiko”
Artist: Yamazawa Eiko
Venue: CADAN YURAKUCHO Space L
Presented by The Third Gallery Aya
Details : https://cadan.org/cadanyurakucho_12spacem/

©YAMAZAWA Eiko “What I Am Doing No,24”

“AKASAKI Mima and Rikako Kawauchi”
Artists: Akasaki Mima, Rikako Kawauchi
Venue: CADAN YURAKUCHO Space S
Presented by WAITINGROOM and The Third Gallery Aya
Details : https://cadan.org/cadanyurakucho_12spaces/

Left: Rikako Kawauchi “in the drawer”, 2024, oil on canvas, 455 x 530 mm
Right: Akasaki Mima “Untitled”, 1998, Ilfochrome print, 520 × 1010 mm