HRD FINE ART

Introduction

HRD Fine Art is delighted to announce a solo exhibition of Ayako Kurihara titled “Mind Games / Decades” on view from June 7 through July 26, 2025. This exhibition will be the third solo presentation of the artist following 2015 and 2020,

Born in Yokohama in 1974, Kurihara graduated from the Aichi Prefectural University of the Arts in 1999. Now based in Yokohama, she has been actively participating in exhibitions, artist-in-residence programs, and art festivals in and outside Japan.

Kurihara has been consistently and extensively working on her lifework painting/performance/installation series titled “Mind Games” since mid-2000s. Borrowing the rules of a nationally popular boardgame called Othello or Reversi, and instead of flipping the double-sided black-and-white discs, Kurihara constructs a painting surface by stamping or dropping bi-color paints, thus physically fixating the gameplay and the time spent on it.

Her creation, characterized by its game-like aspects and automatism resulting from following the rules of the game, has been expanding its conceptual scope through the years incorporating diverse, multi-layered perspectives such as physicality of paints that merge together on the painting surface; duality of painting and object; gestural and replicative aspects of stamping; unpredictability and human communication issues that entails participation of others in the gameplay; reference to code art/cyber art with the use of remote, online gameplay; and metaphorical discourse about the duality and bipolarity of the world. In most recent years, the artist has been working on a new subseries of “Mind Games” titled “Landscape in a Grid,” in which she plays the game of Othello by herself using grid-like patterns found in urban landscapes, more actively connecting with the real world surrounding her while merging painting and photography.

This exhibition attempts to give an overview of Kurihara's "Mind Games" that spans decades, showcasing old, recent, and latest artworks including video work. We invite the viewers to once again take a notice of the intriguing diversity of “Mind Games” as performative art.

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Ayako Kurihara participates in "Art Ohara International Exhibition 2025," an international art festival taking place in Ohara, a rural area situated in the north-eastern part of the Kyoto City, from June 3 through June 22. Please take this opportunity to witness both exhibitions when you visit Kyoto.

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Artist's Statement

In recent years, my feelings have been in a state of quiet fluctuation under the influence of enormous changes happening in the outside world.

This exhibition consists mainly of artworks from the “Mind Games” series I have been working on for about 20 years, as well as works from the most recent painting/photograph series titled “Landscape in a Grid,” through which I attempt to visualize the layers of time from the past to the present, interconnecting urban landscapes and memories.

“Mind Games” has been expanding and changing through the past 20 years. Please listen carefully to the subtle voices of the memories and conversations stored in my artworks, immersing yourself in the flow of time that gets entangled and comes apart.

- Ayako Kurihara