【「SPLIT NANGAA STILL VIBING」@FUKUOKA】

The two-person exhibition “SPLIT NANGAA STILL VIBING,” by calligrapher Lintalow Hashiguchi and painter Kuniyoshi Ikushima, both affiliated with our gallery, is currently on view at Half hitch in Minami-ku, Fukuoka City. The second period began on Saturday, November 7, so we are pleased to share views of the exhibition from the first period, October 31 through November 3.

The exhibition runs through Tuesday, November 10. On the final day, Lintalow Hashiguchi will be present at the gallery from around 3:00 p.m.

We warmly invite you to visit the gallery, and we look forward to welcoming you.

---

Nangarland’s Now-Era Landscape Drawing

Ikushima currently bases a painting practice in Shiiba Village, Miyazaki Prefecture. Recent motifs are the nature around the artist’s home: mountain scenery, clouds, and sunlight filtering through leaves. These are photographed, projected, and traced for their outlines and silhouettes. The colors are drawn from classical East Asian painting of China and Japan.

Building on Western contemporary art, Ikushima refers to Japanese Nanga painting. Just as Chinese literati painting was transformed into Nanga as it crossed to Japan, Ikushima reinterprets contemporary art to suit the artist’s own circumstances. The thinking behind Nanga includes the contrast between city and countryside and a sense of regional place; Ikushima considers that a daily life lived in closeness with nature is connected to the painter’s state of mind.

Ikushima posits that the answer to the question “What am I?” is a story: not a fixed entity, but something that takes shape by being told. If so, to let go of that self, one need only place the story outside oneself. Nanga, which sought to fuse poetry, calligraphy, and painting, laid poetry and context beneath the surface of the work; contemporary art presents this as concept. Ikushima writes out the ideas that keep welling up in the mind as stories and converts them into the conditions of production: motif, color, procedure, and size. The conditions push the mind’s judgment aside, and the hand begins to move.

The conditions are a device for making a painting, and the finished painting becomes a device for looking at oneself. Ikushima repeats this process: looking at the self reflected in the work, then setting the next conditions.

On the other hand, Hashiguchi lives in a depopulated area of the hometown at the westernmost tip of Nagasaki Prefecture, works by day at a farm-equipment shop supporting local agriculture behind the scenes, and continues creative work within that life. It is a practice that presupposes accepting many constraints.

Hashiguchi’s view of art positions calligraphy as something necessary for accepting external constraints and still walking one’s own life with power.

Phrases like slogans, made by docking English words together while ignoring regular grammar, are called “instant poems” (shunkan-shi). Hashiguchi soaks a towel in ink and dives into a large sheet of paper with the whole body.

By stripping calligraphic expression down to its simplest and sharpest form, the attempt is to ask how calligraphy can be built into the cluttered days of an everyday life and capture the core of artistic expression.

In recent years, Hashiguchi has also been publishing, irregularly, the “Nazo no Hon” (Mysterious Book), “a tumultuous tale of crazy people who write characters.”

The story is expressed as junk manga in scattered fragments, and is presented through the outlandish premise that it arrives in a box from a hacked online shop.

Nam June Paik once expressed the coexistence of technological development and humanity optimistically through video art. In the “Mysterious Book,” a single scene is displayed inside each opened box, and when many of these are lined up, they give off a peculiar atmosphere somehow akin to “TV Garden.” Yet it emerges from a present heading toward dystopia, long past the time when an idyllic near future was imagined, and even so, it conveys a modest hope.

This exhibition by Ikushima and Hashiguchi is provisionally titled “SPLIT NANGAA STILL VIBING.” The exhibition title translates to “The Divided Nangarland Is Still Alive (And Feeling Good).” Having gone through “Nangarland,” a mysterious unit advocating contemporary Nanga painting, the two, each living in their own place, have drawn great inspiration from each other, from calligraphy to painting and from painting to calligraphy, and have advanced their own creative work.

This time the two reunite and bring recent works together; through the resonance between them, the exhibition attempts to bring forth the ultimate “Nangar Another World,” with contemporary landscape painting and contemporary calligraphy as keywords.

Litalow Hashiguchi

SPLIT NANGAA STILL VIBING

Artists: Kuniyoshi Ikushima, Lintalow HashiguchiDates: Saturday, November 7 – Tuesday, November 10, 2026Time: 13:00–19:00

Artist in attendance: final day (Tuesday, November 10), from around 3:00 p.m.

Venue: Half hitchRoom 201, Kaneko Building, 1-1 Ichizaki 1-chome, Minami-ku, Fukuoka City, Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan