MAHO KUBOTA GALLERY is pleased to present Yushi Suga’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, featuring new paintings and an installation.

Suga has developed a sculptural approach to painting in which thick layers of paint are applied onto a reflective surface and then carved with a palette knife.
In recent years, he has focused on the concept of “liminal space,” often evoked by places such as empty shopping malls late at night or amusement parks after closing, where reality seems to blur into unreality. Alongside his paintings, Suga has also developed installations in which CG recreations of the exhibition space are projected onto the gallery itself, layering virtual imagery onto the physical environment and blurring the boundary between the real and the virtual.

This exhibition will present new paintings inspired by liminal spaces, as well as a new series titled NØ. Consisting of 26 small works based on the alphabet, each piece combines a hand-painted image with a 3D-printed reproduction derived from the original painting. By connecting handmade and mechanically generated imagery within a single composition, the works blur the boundary between “original” and “copy.” The symbol “Ø” refers to the mathematical sign for the empty set, representing the concept of nonexistence. The title NØ also carries a playful sense of simultaneously affirming and negating presence and absence.
In addition to these works, the exhibition will also feature an installation using projection technology.

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Yushi Suga’s Past, Present, and Future: On NØ
Hiroki Yamamoto (Cultural Studies Scholar)

Centered on the concept of “liminality,” artist Yushi Suga has, through his painting practice, continuously inverted, separated, and dissolved binary oppositions such as “reality and fiction,” “front and back,” and “figure and ground.” Frequently referenced in his work, the “liminal spaces” that recur as interior or exterior environments exist somewhere between presence and absence. By, for example, constructing fictional liminal spaces through 3DCG and then using them as the motif for paintings, Suga has persistently deconstructed the dichotomous relationship between reality and fiction throughout his practice. The new works presented in this exhibition conceptually push the boundary between the “actual image” and the “virtual image” to an extreme. The recognizable imagery that had appeared as motifs in his earlier works has now disappeared, replaced instead by signs that emerge as purely abstract concepts.

Suga’s newly initiated “NØ” series consists of paintings depicting the letters of the alphabet from “A” to “Z,” yet the production process itself is multilayered. One half of each work — sometimes divided vertically, sometimes horizontally — is painted by the artist’s own hand, while the other half is replicated by a machine (a 3D printer). At first glance, the resulting paintings may appear to present an idyllic vision of “collaboration between human and machine,” but the series raises far more complex questions. Technological advancement has been remarkable: 3D printers are now capable of reproducing thick painterly brushstrokes with near perfection. Yet details lacking a certain physical thickness — in other words, elements that cannot be quantified — remain outside the scope of reproduction. Skillfully utilizing this characteristic (which might even be described as a “bug” inherent to technology), Suga also allows asymmetrical alphabetic forms to emerge upon the canvas.

The inclusion of the symbol “Ø,” signifying the empty set, in the title “NØ” reflects Suga’s distinctive sense of humor, while simultaneously referring to the conceptual core of the series, revealing its continuity with his earlier works. In the realm of set theory, the empty set — a state containing nothing — is nevertheless treated as a set in itself. This notion symbolically encapsulates Suga’s artistic practice, which has consistently explored the gap between presence and absence. As anthropologist Victor W. Turner pointed out, liminal entities are betwixt and between and possess necessarily ambiguous attributes. These works clearly demonstrate the continuous trajectory running through Suga’s practice from past to present, unified by the concept of liminality.

Moreover, the new installation work suggests a further development toward the future. In this installation, the “actual image” (the part painted by the artist’s own hand) and the “virtual image” (the part produced by the 3D printer), which had previously been integrated within a single work in the “NØ” series, are separated into two distinct entities. Furthermore, an inversion takes place: the “actual image” is presented as a projected image and thereby transformed into a “virtual image,” while the “virtual image” exists physically in the exhibition space as an actual object, thereby becoming “actual.” The installation condenses Suga’s true strength as a trickster who destabilizes and subverts the boundary between fiction and reality.