Plastic Love [group]

Curator: Nathalie Baume
URL: https://www.marguo.com/

“Plastic Love” brings together 19 artists across three generations of Japanese and Japanese-diaspora backgrounds, whose work transforms painting, sculpture, and installation into living archives—infused with personal histories, spiritual echoes, and material invention. From On Kawara’s meditative date painting and Izumi Kato’s hand-painted stone totems to Yuko Mohri’s kinetic environments and Tenki Hiramatsu’s probing psychological portraits, the exhibition reveals how tradition can be stretched, reshaped, and reborn.
Taking its title from Mariya Takeuchi’s 1984 city pop anthem, Plastic Love explores how emotion and memory circulate through form—between the synthetic and the sincere, the personal and the collective, the modern and the mythic. The exhibition traces a distinctly Japanese sensitivity to surface, time, and material, while also reflecting the artists’ wide-ranging geographies, generational experiences, and evolving relationships to cultural legacy.