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Exhibitions & Installations
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About

19 September, 2025 – 16 January,2026

Curated by Miao Xuan Liu

Prince Takamado Gallery
at the Canadian Embassy to Japan
Tokyo, Japan

Exhibition statement

In Patience and Persistence, an ephemeral force undergirds the work of Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka and Johnny Nghiem. Hanging from thread, wavering images on delicate sheets scatter like constellations among intricate Washi clothing, patchworked sculpture, and textile. Some dangle variably off kozo sticks like husks. All are aglow with a seemingly immanent translucency.

Washi is traditional Japanese paper made from the renewable plant fibers of kozo, mitsumata, and gampi. In Patience and Persistence, this laborious, ancient, and endangered material forms the subject and medium of formal experimentation and embodied labour. Emerging from Hatanaka’s intimate engagements with traditional paper makers in Japan and Vietnam and documented through video and image by Nghiem, the exhibition touches upon themes of lineage, ecological wellbeing, and interconnectedness.

In Nghiem’s photographs of rural and urban Japan and Vietnam, life is at a standstill. In effect, presences are sensed more than imaged, the interior life a stand-in for corporeality. Bodies are glimpsed from behind, and uninhabited landscapes are captured indiscreetly in a mirror’s burnished glow. In the weightlessness that results, a diasporic imprecision thwarts any attempts at chronology. Rather, we encounter a dreamlike quality beyond the concretized confines of colonial time and place.

Hatanaka likewise demonstrates an affinity for the rhythms of the natural world. In her hand, milk white surfaces are stained with pigment from the earth. The marks are sometimes precise, such as printed swathes of undulating snow of the Arctic, memorializing her long-term collaboration with communities in Kinngait, Nunavut, and other times the marks are intuitive free free-handed gestures. This contrast is no coincidence - Hatanaka is interested in the calcified and transformative side by side, prodding delicate equilibria found at the centre of both ecological and emotional health.

One only needs to read the artwork titles to realize that for the artist, these terrains of uncertainty are equal parts bodily as terrestrial: “Aftershocks”, “one last thing”, “freeze or fly, fly or flight”. Strata upon strata, patch by patch, through Hatanaka’s hand instability takes form where the personal, environmental, and historical collide. This reflects an engagement with ecological metaphors of mental wellness, including her own experience with depression and bipolar.
By forging strength from fragility and combining artistic production with social enterprise, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka and Johnny Nghiem underscore the interconnected nature that animates their practices. Patience and Persistence extends that spirit, presenting a significant survey of artworks embedded with craft philosophy. As the persistent stream that carves through calcified stone over time, this exhibition suggests that principles which sustain ecological systems might be the same ones that also support human and relational wellness, commemorating the slow, gestural, and measured force.

— Miao Xuan Liu

The works are almost entirely created with washi (Japanese paper) made by Kashiki Seishi, a seventh generation family mill in the famous region of Tosa Washi, producing within a tradition of over 1000 years, where Hatananaka was artist in residence. The exhibition encapsulates three years of the artists’ evolving work together, including two documentaries learning with great appreciation about regionally specific, environmentally sustainable papermaking traditions: one in Kochi, Japan, and the other in northern Vietnam – the places of the artists’ ancestry.