Yutaka Kikutake Gallery is pleased to announce a group show featuring the London artist duo Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, as well as Tokyo-based author and artist Erika Kobayashi. We welcome London gallery Arcadia Missa, which represents Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, as a guest exhibitor for this show held as part of Onsen Confidential.

Working in a wide range of material approaches, including novels, manga, drawing, photography, video, and installation, Erika Kobayashi has received critical acclaim for work inspired by invisible forces, time and history, family and memory, and the traces of place. In recent years, Kobayashi has worked on a screenplay for the musical recitation drama Girls Making Paper Balloon Bombs that depicts schoolgirls mobilized to make balloon bombs during World War 2. In advance of the publication of her novel The Paper Balloon Bomb Follies by publisher Bungei Shunju, this exhibition features work about the girls who were unintentionally drawn into the war through an examination of the history of the Tokyo Takarazuka Theater and its use as a manufacturing site for these balloon bombs. The painting in this exhibition takes its theme from Haru no Odori (Spring Dance), the first post-war performance held by the Takarazuka Revue. It depicts a group of surviving mobilized students performing a traditional line dance at the unveiling of the first stage troupe. In a first for her work, Kobayashi uses a kimono inherited from her grandmother as the surface for the painting. The long sleeves of this kimono, along with the use of its inner lining that sit close to the female wearer’s skin, create a connection between the painting and the bodies of the young dancing girls at its center.

Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings (b. 1991. Newcastle, London) are a London-based artist duo known for their exploration of queer identity, urban spaces, and social politics. Their practice is multi-disciplinary encompassing; fresco painting, drawing, video, performance, print-making, publishing and installation. Grounded in researching how various communities have been represented throughout history, they interpret social and political issues by drawing from art history and archives. Their work invites viewers to question their relationships with space, power dynamics, social hierarchy, class, order, and obedience within our public spaces. The works are a part of a series of frescoes which are portraits of sumptuously dressed figures standing outside and in front of buildings. The subjects are invented, created from multiple references and time periods. The portraits exist in a world that has been developed throughout their fresco cycles, one that looks at public space in relation to issues of authority, surveillance and dynamics of power. Within public space there is increasingly a move to criminalise and control the existence of trans and gender nonconforming subjects. The subjects of these portraits exist within this world.

Despite the differences in histories and contexts between East and West, the artists in this exhibition share a common process that employs a wide range of expressive approaches, such as painting, video, performance, publishing, and installation, based on thorough archival research.

What is Onsen Confidential?
Onsen Confidential is a hybrid event featuring city-wide gallery exhibitions and a natural hot spring retreat and conference. This project brings together like-mined gallerists in a sprit of collaboration and cooperation, and seeks to provide a friendly introduction to the unique context of Tokyo’s contemporary art scene.