Walking Barefoot

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Walking Barefoot

TOKAS Creator-in Residence Exhibition

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Walking Barefoot

TOKAS Creator-in-Residence 2026 Exhibition

Related Event
Participating Creator

Group exhibition by 13 artsits who participated in the Creator-in-Residence Programs

This two-part exhibition presents the work of 13 Japanese and international creators who took part in residencies in Tokyo and at various locations around the world in 2025. Part 1 brings together seven creators, including those who produced work during their stay at the TOKAS Residency with the shared theme of “Technology and the future of humanity,” and Part 2 brings together six creators, with each part presented as a group exhibition in a shared space.

In our society, people’s values and ways of thinking are often defined by the groups to which they belong. Much like a pair of shoes, this protects us and makes it easier to navigate the world, while at the same time placing a certain distance between us and the world. In pursuing their respective themes, the artists featured here, whether by choice or by necessity, slip off those shoes and walk the world barefoot to feel it afresh.

In their practices, which deal with social relations, we see perspectives that set aside categories and roles to refocus on the individual. By tuning in to the thoughts of those living in other times or places, or looking closely at a part of the body, they encounter others on a plane apart from location or identity.
When confronting what lies beyond the human, however, the shoes of society are of no use. Human beings have formed groups and developed societies in order to survive in the face of threats from the natural world. Even so, when we re-engage with nature, we have no choice but to stand as barefoot creatures equipped with nothing but our own body and senses.

Whether of their own accord or out of necessity, the creators step away for a time from the assumptions of society, embrace a degree of vulnerability, and seek to close the distance between themselves and the world. Just as walking barefoot over grass or stone reawakens us to the richness of texture and the delicacy of our skin, they draw on their own felt experience to form fresh connections with the world. In this exhibition, the paths they have walked barefoot come into view.

Information

Title	TOKAS Creator-in-Residence 2026 Exhibition “Walking Barefoot”
Period	[Part 1] June 27 (Sat) - Aug 2 (Sun), 2026 [Part 2] Aug 15 (Sat) - Sep 20 (Sun), 2026
Time	11:00-19:00 (Last entry: 18:30)
Closed	Mondays (except July 20), July 21
Venue	Tokyo Arts and Space Hongo (2-4-16 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo)
Artists	[Part 1] Alexia ACHILLEOS, Anais-karenin, Eduardo CASTILLO-VINUESA, IKEZOE Shun, INOUE Takuya, MURAKAMI Kaoru, NOGAMI Katsuki [Part 2] GANG Donghoon, HALA Saori, MIZUNO Nagisa, Diego PÉREZ, Synphysica, USAMI Nao
Admission	Free
Organizer	Tokyo Arts and Space (Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture)
Partner Institutions	Atelier Mondial (Basel, Switzerland), Callie’s (Berlin, Germany), Centre Clark / Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (Quebec [Montreal], Canada), HIAP [Helsinki International Artist Programme] / The Finnish Cultural Foundation (Helsinki, Finland), Treasure Hill Artist Village / Artist-in-Residence Taipei (Taipei, Taiwan), WIELS / Government of Flanders (Brussels, Belgium)

[Part 1] June 27 (Sat) - Aug 2 (Sun), 2026 *Information for artists in [Part 2]

Theme Projects “Technology and the future of humanity”

For this theme project, artists participating in the TOKAS Residency pursued artistic activities individually, under the common theme of “Technology and the future of humanity,” while also engaging in dialogues and discussions.
The artists discussed how they present and respond—through their respective works and artistic practices—to the influence of technology on human perception, and the relationship between technology and societal transformations, and explored the clues of their activities and approaches.

The Fox Who Tricked the Superintelligence & Other Stories, 2025-
Photo: Loucas STAVROU

Alexia ACHILLEOS

International Creator Residency Program
Residency Period: 2025.5–7
Residence: TOKAS Residency

Achilleos is an artist and researcher who investigates how history, culture, and geopolitics intersect with the power structures that shape technology. During her stay in Tokyo, she created a participatory card game in which players work together to create new “fairy tales” that challenge Big Tech’s utopian myths about AI and the future. In this exhibition, she presents the card game together with the various stories that have emerged from each round of play in different locations.

Ancestralidade: planta., 2023
Photo: TAKEHISA Naoki

Anais-karenin

Local Creator Residency Program
Residency Period: 2025.5–7
Residence: TOKAS Residency

Anais-karenin’s practice engages with knowledge systems beyond colonial modernity, unfolding through sensory methodologies to rearticulate interspecies relations with plants within ancestral cosmologies. During her stay in Tokyo, she investigated the history of technology from the Edo period (1603–1868) through modernization, examining how the construction of knowledge systems gave rise to both the classification of medicinal plants and minerals and an extractivist gaze toward them. At the same time, she explored the intersection between ancestral knowledge and artificial intelligence from an ontological perspective. In this exhibition, she presents a series of works where belief and knowledge are rearticulated beyond the logic of neocolonialism.

RAINMAKERS [Exhibition cut], 2026

Eduardo CASTILLO-VINUESA

International Creator Residency Program
Residency Period: 2025.5–8
Residence: TOKAS Residency

An architect, researcher, and filmmaker, Castillo-Vinuesa explores the territory where climate, technology, and geopolitics overlap, examining how spatial technologies and visual culture influence contemporary modes of governance and the transformation of ecosystems. During his stay in Tokyo, he conducted research on weather forecasting and modification systems, focusing on “Moonshot Goal 8,” a Japan-led initiative aiming to control weather by 2050. His video installation in this exhibition illuminates the current situation, in which the atmosphere is treated not only as part of the natural world, but also as a contested medium where the boundary between observation and intervention is increasingly difficult to trace.

Support: The Ministry of Culture of the Government of Spain

Post-Body Rehearsal, 2025
Photo: MANIWA Yuki

NOGAMI Katsuki

Local Creator Residency Program
Residency Period: 2025.5–7
Residence: TOKAS Residency

Nogami investigates online and offline identities in our digital society, and how each is shaped by the body and by memory. During his residency at TOKAS, he carried out an interactive experiment in which he had an AI write the following day’s diary entry based on his own diary, then adjusted his behavior accordingly, and performed a VR piece focused on the gap between the avatar and the physical body. In this exhibition, he presents archives of these works together with a musical piece he began producing during the residency as a means of documenting his own emotional responses.

Video excerpt from new video piece, 2026

IKEZOE Shun

Tokyo-Brussels Exchange Residency Program
Residency Period: 2025.4–6
Residence: WIELS

Ikezoe, whose practice bridges film and contemporary art, collects the stories and recollections of individuals who tend to be overlooked by society and history, recasting them as universal narratives. In Geel, Belgium, where he undertook his residency, people with mental illness have lived alongside local residents for more than 700 years, and the tradition of foster family care continues to this day. Drawing on interviews conducted there, he presents a video installation that reframes “healthy” and “ill” as lying on a single continuum, questioning where the boundary between them falls.

Support: THE ASAHI SHIMBUN FOUNDATION

Project “ABC”, 2025
©Alexis BERNARD

INOUE Takuya

Tokyo-Quebec Exchange Residency Program
Residency Period: 2025.4–7
Residence: Centre Clark

Inoue makes paintings that take as their starting point the landscapes and people he encounters in his travels, exploring the concept of universality. In Quebec, he carried out a participatory project asking each person to mix paints to match the color they imagined as “skin color.” Through this, he says, he came to feel firsthand what it means to live in a country founded on diversity, and to recognize the violence inherent in the very act of questioning universality. Looking beyond his own viewpoint and drawing on his relationships with others, he presents paintings driven by the question “what do I not see?”

Test piece of Nono-shi, 2026

MURAKAMI Kaoru

Tokyo-Basel Exchange Residency Program
Residency Period: 2025.4–6
Residence: Atelier Mondial

Through research combining intuition and theory, which she calls “walks,” Murakami examines the relationship between humans and nature as mediated by technology. In Basel, she investigated the local history of papermaking and printing and made paper from weeds. In the course of this work, she noticed that changing the water at regular intervals helped maintain the condition of the plant fibers, which led her to focus on the tension between the forces of nature and human control and management. The centerpiece of her work in this exhibition is a sculpture combining video and a water circulation system.

[Part 2] Aug 15 (Sat) - Sep 20 (Sun), 2026

Binary Composition for Two Cellos, 2024
Photo: Ivan MURZIN

GANG Donghoon

International Creator Residency Program
Residency Period: 2026.1–3
Residence: TOKAS Residency

Gang is an artist, composer, and researcher who explores how sound and music have been consumed and misused in society throughout history. During his stay in Tokyo, he deepened his postcolonial inquiry into musical hierarchies that arose from the influx of Western music into East Asia in the course of modernization, and into the music education of the time. He presents a work focusing on a children’s song with a melody that originated in the West 300 years ago. The song spread to various parts of the world, its lyrics and context changing along the way, and remains widely known in both Japan and South Korea today.

P wave, 2021
Photo: NAKAYAMA Yunosuke

HALA Saori

Tokyo-Taipei Exchange Residency Program
Residency Period: 2025.9-11
Residence: Treasure Hill Artist Village

Hala stages performances responding to “choreographic” phenomena embedded in spaces and the fabric of society. While researching how people relate to earthquakes in Taipei, she encountered other, overlapping forms of “shaking”: the military tensions and information warfare that run beneath the surface, and institutional routines such as nationwide disaster drills. Through video, photography, and performance, Hala seeks to expand our imagination toward “the body that remembers and prepares for crisis,” and to connect that imagination to the broader issue of the body’s relation to catastrophe in all its forms, from disaster to war.

Support: istyle Art and Foundation

Tour workshop, 2025
Photo: Mikko LUOSTARINEN

MIZUNO Nagisa

Tokyo-Helsinki Exchange Residency Program
Residency Period: 2025.8-11
Residence: HIAP [Helsinki International Artist Programme]

Mizuno explores relationships between people and the land, and the forms care can take. She turned her attention to Vuosaari Hill in Helsinki, a former landfill site that has since become home to a thriving ecosystem of plants and animals. Deepening her understanding through conversations with soil specialists and the hill’s maintenance workers, she organized a workshop in the form of a walking tour. With a geologist as guide, participants engaged with the history of the land and encountered scenery and sounds along the way. Drawing on these encounters and each person’s responses to them, Mizuno worked with the group to create sound poetry. In this exhibition, through stories drawn from these records and memories, she puts forward possibilities for more varied and inclusive ways of relating between people and place.

Sumida fountain I, 2025
Photo: MANIWA Yuki

Diego PÉREZ

International Creator Residency Program
Residency Period: 2025.9–11
Residence: TOKAS Residency

Pérez works in painting, photography, sculpture, and other media, taking materials, regional histories, his engagement with everyday life, and his exchanges with others as points of departure. During his stay in Tokyo, he spent much of his time walking around Sumida-ku and its surroundings, devoting himself to documenting what he saw each day. Drawn to the changing streetscape and clusters of buildings, he produced ceramic works that overlaid these scenes with his own memories and images. He also presents a copper sculpture through which water circulates, inspired by Japanese gardens and made in collaboration with a watering can artisan.

Virtual Root, 2021

Synphysica (FANG Chih Hsuan & CHOU Chiao Chi)

International Creator Residency Program
Residency Period: 2026.1–3
Residence: TOKAS Residency

Synphysica is a collective that uses art and science to explore interactions between human beings and non-human systems. By rendering biological signals visible, they illuminate environments that lie beyond human perception and seek to trace their contours from the subjective viewpoint of living things. During their residency in Tokyo, they investigated Japanese gardens and forests, examining the tension between controlled environments and ecological thinking. Drawing on this research, they use living plants and trees to create a space of dialogue between humans and nature in this exhibition.

Silence and Oblivion, 2025
Photo: Leonard NEUBERGER

USAMI Nao

Tokyo-Basel Exchange Residency Program
Residency Period: 2025.9-11
Residence: Atelier Mondial

Drawing on feminist research, Usami works in video and performance, as well as video games that draw close to the perspectives and bodily sensations of others. In Berlin, she visited wartime sites including underground bunkers and concentration camps, researching experiences of physical and mental oppression. The video game she presents in this exhibition takes as its subject writers who continued working in secret during the war and were made to witness the burning of their own books, rendering the warmth of human bodies and books alike in 3D computer graphics and enabling viewers to undergo the experience vicariously. The performance piece choreographed by choreographer and performer Moe Kobayashi, who stayed during the same period, with a video created by Usami, will be presented during this exhibition.

Support: Kumagai Masatoshi Culture Foundation

Related Event

Part 1: Artist Talk 1

Date	June 28, 2026 (Sun) 16:00-18:00
Artists	Alexia ACHILLEOS, Anais-karenin, Eduardo CASTILLO-VINUESA, INOUE Takuya, NOGAMI Katsuki
Venue	Tokyo Arts and Space Hongo
Admission	Free
Language	Japanese / English

*Schedule and participants are subject to change.

Part 1: Artist Talk 2

Date	July 4, 2026 (Sat) 16:00-17:00
Artists	IKEZOE Shun, MURAKAMI Kaoru
Venue	Tokyo Arts and Space Hongo
Admission	Free
Language	Japanese

*Schedule and participants are subject to change.

Part 2: Artist Talk 1

Date	Aug 16, 2026 (Sun) 16:00-17:30
Artists	HALA Saori, MIZUNO Nagisa, USAMI Nao
Venue	Tokyo Arts and Space Hongo
Admission	Free
Language	Japanese

*Schedule and participants are subject to change.

Part 2: Artist Talk 2

Date	Aug 22, 2026 (Sat) 16:00-17:30
Artists	GANG Donghoon, Diego PÉREZ, Synphysica
Venue	Tokyo Arts and Space Hongo
Admission	Free
Language	Japanese / English

*Schedule and participants are subject to change.