Review: Tabata, Hughes, and Wakikawa ("Stepping into a World VI")
- Feb 3
- 6 min read
Chunbum Park
New York, NY
2026-02-03
Motoichi Adachi and Kyoko Sato curate a group show titled, “Stepping into a World VI,” as part of their Art Incubation Series at the Gallery Max in SOHO, promoting the cross-cultural exchange of ideas and visions between the Japanese, international, and American artists.
At the juried exhibition, Elee Danny is awarded the grand prize; Asami Moriya and Jun Kawamura, the first runner-up; Herocca, John, Nori, Ryu Yokoyama, Sachiko Koda, Shinji Yamakawa, Toko Idetsuki, Yoshie Hughes, Yufuko Katahira, and Yumi Hotta, second runner-up.
Hidden amongst the eclectic group were three artists whose art asserted their voice and message with complete mastery and full conviction or belief, on their own terms: Tsukasa Wakikawa, Yoshie Hughes, and Sumiko Tabata.
Tsukasa Wakikawa’s “Dragonfly No. 2” (2025) is an acrylic painting that appears representational in certain aspects and abstract or abstracted in other ways, but it is neither, as the work refuses an easy dogmatic categorization. Wakikawa’s painting depicts what appears to be a lotus flower in the center, which is a symbol native to Buddhism, and dragonflies that scatter in the surrounding space and equate to the vision of summer and autumn, as well as the metaphor for courage and victory (for the Japanese). Historically, the samurai adopted their symbolic image to embrace fearlessness and the victorious spirit. Taken together with the lotus flower, we are reminded of Kato Kiyomasa, one of three senior commanders during the Japanese invasion of Korea (1592 - 1598), as he was a samurai and a Buddhist. (Kiyomasa came into rivalry with Konishi Yukinaga, who was Christian.) Coincidentally, numerous colorful crosses form a grid within the lotus flower, and these crosses may be a sub-conscious allusion or reference to Christianity or Yukinaga himself.
In any case, the grid is very genuinely formulated, following an internal logic to the code of abstraction, spacing and composition, and color. This grid is reminiscent of the 1980s computer graphics aesthetics of Laura Owens’s ultra-modern and contemporary paintings. Yet, it is also uniquely culturally Japanese, as if it beckons the contemporary aesthetics of brightly colored and patterned paper used in Japanese origami.
This grid packaged into the overall form of a lotus flower, as well as the dragonflies, heavily contrast the negative spaces in the background in terms of how they are arrived at on the canvas. Whereas the background appears too intentional and limited to or boxed within the knowns (or what the artist knows), the grid and the dragonflies come from the artist’s inner necessity and internal creative drive. This necessity and drive escape the knowns and enter into the realm of the much greater unknowns. It is the correct decision to prioritize the gridded lotus flower and the dragonflies as they are the main subjects and the foreground of the painting, while the surrounding space is relegated to the lesser role of the background.
When painting the negative space, the artist followed a preconceived and fixed notion of painting in a semi-illustrational and semi-abstract style; however, when painting the foreground, the artist spoke to the inner voice within themselves and made contact with this inner being. The artist did not have to derive or intend the forms of the foreground with the knowns but subconsciously let the forms out from within their soul. In the process, Wakikawa dug and sought for an answer with validity and truthfulness. The result is a painting that completes itself through its own internal logic, which the artist simply had to follow like an echo that materializes within the painting process (which is the feedback loop of putting down the paint and observing the painting).
Yoshie Hughes paints a hyper-realistic portrait of a grandfather holding a baby. It’s very well-painted, not overly done, and bright, consisting of mostly lighter tones contrasted by mid-level shadows. The baby exhibits a flesh that feels fresh and un-weathered, whereas the grandfather is molded and shaped by the forces and the challenges of life. The realism exists not only in the realistic style but also the believable situation or comparison that the painting makes about the two figures. Even the background is highly controlled, subdued in terms of color and saturation behind the two luminous figures. We can see a flat landscape and a vastly expansive sky seeping through the figures in the form of the negative space, as if the two are white Americans in the Southwest.
The relationship between the baby and the grandfather are unequal, yet balanced: the baby is the vulnerable and weaker one of the two, yet the baby is the promise of the future and holds greater potential energy and power, while the grandfather only has several years or a few decades left of him. The grandfather is the provider and the baby is the receiver, yet the baby commands the grandfather, in a power dynamic like the inverted version of the master and the slave. The bond between them is unconditional love, which cannot be bought or sold with money or any other incentive from the material world. This unconditional love carries the quality of an extradimensional spiritual world or the aesthetic realm from which human imagination originates. So much more can be read into the painting, but we must make a pause here with the lesson that a strong realist or hyperrealist painting must be tightly curated in terms of the visual and narrative elements to achieve its impact in a convincing manner.
Last but not least, we have Sumiko Tabata’s “Hitomi” (2024), which is a stunning masterpiece playing on the various languages and conventions of art and contains the sincere and honest spirit of the artist. Tabata’s sculpture carries a profound quality that reflects the artist’s own life philosophy and sensitivity to the creative necessity and inner drive found within the artist’s psyche.
“Hitomi” cannot be an ordinary sculpture that anyone could say, “I could also do that,” to. It is an extraordinary achievement, in which the ideas of labor and refinement versus de-skilling and crudeness intertwine, resulting in an aesthetic object that does not belong in our physical world and came from a magical somewhere. This object may appear juvenile and crude on the surface, but it is a thorough investigation of the visual languages and styles of modernism and contemporary sculpture.
The object is contained within traditional Japanese/Asian sculptural and architectural tradition of the totems, including the “Kamui Mintara,” as carved by the Ainu tribes living in northern Japan. The execution of the piece is highly sophisticated and refined, following the internal logic of contemporary language of sculpture, alternating between sculpture and drawing, 3-dimensional object and 2-dimensional image, between shaping and carving, and between subtraction and addition. “Hitomi” involves the interplay of refinement and detail versus the letting go (of control and predetermined notions of what the image or object should be) and excavating the unknowns in order to synthesize a new authentic possibility of expression and discovery. Tabata allows the wooden block to transform into an improbable and powerful configuration by trusting the process and following the internal logic of the sculpture itself.
All great art is formed by an unstoppable inner drive and necessity that is found when the artist connects themselves to their inner source. This source provides the language and the framework with which the art completes itself, as if the artist is following the instructions from a higher voice.
Art is not an invention of humans. It is a convention and a logic that predates humanity’s existence, to be found within the mathematical possibilities of visual expression that define good art, bad art, and non-art. I feel that if non-art is 99% of this set of visual outcomes, then bad art would be the 0.99%, and good art would be in the absolute minority of 0.01%. In other words, art that is strong and can withstand the test of time is an absolute miracle and a mathematical improbability.
Yet, artists who can connect with their inner source at a genuine level (of communication) can arrive at powerful expressions and transform the mathematical impossibility (of giving birth to such art) into a continual repetition and cyclical fact of life. As we experience in the works of Wakikawa, Hughes, and Tabata, the viewers who can connect to their inner voice too can understand good works as a form of communication achieved by the artist to their inner self. In this sense, aesthetics is a universal language and standard, and we perceive that this language comes from a higher dimension and source that is coiled up densely within each and every one of us.
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