TOMOKO NAGAI: ORIGAMI LIGHT AND CABBAGE CURTAINS
PERROTIN Seoul is pleased to present Origami Light and Cabbage Green Curtains, a solo exhibition by Tomoko Nagai.
May 15 – June 27, 2026
Focusing on the artist’s recent works, the exhibition offers an overview of thedistinctive visual language and sensibility she has developed through painting. Nagai’s compositions begin with everyday and intimate subjects, which she reconfigures into unique spatial structures and rhythms. Intuitive arrangements, bold colors, and swift brushwork bring a vivid energy to the canvas, while familiar motifs are placed and expanded in unexpected ways.
This painterly approach creates scenes where reality and imagination intersect, inviting viewers to move fluidly between layered moments. The exhibition highlights Nagai’s refined sense of form and her position within contemporary painting, suggesting new possibilities for a practice where personal memory and visual imagination converge. Teddy bears, girls, dollhouses, flowers, and picnics are certainly among Tomoko Nagai's recurring motifs, yet her works are never simply cute as one might expect. Her painterly surfaces have intricate strata of colors, strokes, and sometimes sprayed gradations that the true depth of layering can never be fully reproduced in photographs.
The ‘new-tro’ palette is also edgy and sophisticated. Every corner of her paintings brims with a striking sense of form and color: playful, yet grounded in years of cultivated experience in paint and dry media that lend her work daring confidence. Nagai's paintings unfold like a warm, hazy atlas, filled with the joy of painting, the serenity of composition, and a sense of blissful emotion.
Nagai was born in Aichi Prefecture, home to Nagoya—Japan's third-largest city after Tokyo and Osaka. After graduating from the oil painting department of Aichi University of the Arts, she began her professional career primarily in Tokyo. Like many of Japan's elite art universities, Aichi maintains a rigorous entrance examination system grounded in academic tradition, with an emphasis on classical exercises—plaster casts, still lifes, and self-portraits. The university also counts Yoshitomo Nara among its alumni, an artist celebrated for his now-iconic portraits of girls; like him, Nagai also prepared for the demanding “art entrance exam,” acquiring a fully traditional foundation in drawing and composition before gradually moving toward her currentstyle. Nagai's images—girls in dresses, pink rabbits, simplified trees and mushrooms, spaces emptied of conventional perspective—may at first seem disarmingly naïve. But a closer look reveals the hand of a dexterous painter: a finely calibrated sense of balance, controlled layering of paint, confident strokes, and tight details that together confirm a ‘technically’ faux-naïf style.
Characteristic of Nagai’s paintings, Renaissance perspective is often abandoned in favor of laying out animals, plants, and small objects across the picture plane, almost like Roman wall paintings; unhierarchical and flat, the scene maps out a sense of openness and freedom. A carpet gradually transforms into a night sky, and flowers in a pot spill out into a tropical jungle, bleeding into one another like a single continuous thread of narrative. This spatial fluidity recalls the work of Henri Matisse, who, in his charming interior scenes of hotel rooms in Nice, would insert a glimpse of the French Riviera beyond a window frame, or let the pattern of a tablecloth climb upward into the wallpaper, bending the space between the different dimensions with characteristic grace.
In both cases, the images seem to suspend the ordinary passage of time, allowing only the sweetest moments of happiness to flow on. Space shifts freely in Nagai’s paintings from a girl’s bedroom to a dollhouse or a forest, then to the cover of a notebook, as checkered patterns, polka dots, fruits, and animal characters drift playfully. The artist’s quick and lively marks keep our eyes in constant, pleasurable motion. Just as children peer into a dollhouse, the pictorial space is at once three-dimensional and unfolded, interior yet exterior, real yet artificial in these paradoxically refreshing settings.