KUBOTAOGUISS Tomohiro

An exhibition, planned and organized by TAIRA Yuichiro and KUBOTAOGUISS Tomohiro, that presented for the first time materials from the studio of NAKANISHI Natsuyuki (1935–2016), donated in autumn 2025 to the Center of Creative Inheritance for the Future, Tokyo University of the Arts. Through more than 9,000 drawings as well as photographs, film, templates, manuscripts, letters, and books from his library, it introduced traces of Nakanishi’s making and thinking.

On the first floor, “Traces of the Hand,” materials produced “before” and “after” Nakanishi’s making were arranged; on the second floor, “Treading the Traces,” the exhibition presented responses that artists and researchers produced by browsing, selecting, and editing the archive.

For display furniture, about 300 box stools from within the university were borrowed and returned to their original use after the exhibition—a decision made so as not to leave a new burden of storage behind.

After an artist is gone, who keeps, preserves, makes public, and uses the works and materials, and on what judgments? By opening the archive at Tokyo University of the Arts—a place of education and making where Nakanishi once studied and taught—the exhibition reconsidered how such inheritance might take place.

This essay reconsiders the way artworks behave as “debts”—continuing to demand maintenance, judgment, and responsibility—as a given condition shared by artistic production and institutions, and attempts to redesign artistic practice by working backward from that condition. Drawing on David Graeber’s theory of debt, it reveals a structure in which, even after a work has been acquired or accessioned, the “end of response” is erased from institutions and demands for maintenance keep accumulating. Through analyses of cases of disposal and deterioration, it examines the mechanism by which works are preserved as value yet left suspended without anyone to take them on, and discusses how their debt-like character continues to be externalized at sites of production. Referring to Hanna B. Hölling’s understanding of the archive as the basis of a work’s identity, it then proposes building conditions of judgment, ranges of variability, and end conditions into the work as its components, so that “designing the death of the work,” rather than prolonging its life, is taken on as artistic practice. When a judgment not to take on too much is internalized in making, how might the speed and scale of production that institutions have demanded, and the ethics of the division of labor premised on “keeping,” be reorganized? The essay asks about this possibility.

Selected as runner-up in the 17th Bijutsu Techo Art Criticism Award (organized by Bijutsu Shuppan-sha); the full text was published on the Bijutsu Techo website (2026).

A sculptural project that asks who takes on material as debt, and how it continues to be managed. Taking as its subject soil contaminated by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, it envisions that material being “inherited” by museums and art institutions as an artwork. The plan was presented at TAAP (Tokyo Artist Accelerator Program) in 2025, and the work has been in production since then.

A restaging of the 2017 graduation work Temporary Disposal Inventory, presented about eight years later in the solo exhibition “R: 5 out of ?”. Family belongings and the artist’s own past works accumulated in their living space were brought into the gallery, then sorted and rearranged throughout the exhibition period. Against the background of a change in living situation, the artist used the exhibition as a place for tidying up and faced the same task once again. The “R” of the title stands for reuse, rearrangement, reconstruction and the like; “5 out of ?” expresses the incompleteness and provisional nature of the work. The work asks, from the overlap between life and practice, how artworks and other made things are kept or left behind over time, and whether they function as assets or remain as debts.

Curated by COM_COURSE (KUBOTAOGUISS Tomohiro and YOSHIMURA Shin), an exhibition composed of prints by OGUISS Takanori, a group of forgeries bearing his name, and works by KUBOTAOGUISS and Yoshimura. The forgeries on view came from the KUBOTAOGUISS family’s former holdings and from online marketplaces. Rather than imitations of his style, they appear to be paintings by other hands to which only the signature was later added.

Taking as its starting point the landscapes of OGUISS Takanori, a painter active in 20th-century Paris, the exhibition reconstructs fragmented histories of Japanese and French art as a space, grafting personal memories and fiction onto them. As the artists traced his footsteps, their search often crossed into the realm of fiction, its focus slipping toward figures whose historical outlines remain uncertain.

Does a name guarantee authenticity, or is it the name that produces fiction? Rather than presenting definitive historical facts, the exhibition shows a landscape of the past opened up as multiple possibilities.

Selected for OPEN SITE 9 (FY2024), an open call organized by Tokyo Arts and Space.

The artist assumes responsibility for the storage and management of another person’s collection, presenting 12 hand-crafted white storage boxes and a management database made for that purpose as a work of art. The collection is a commemorative coin collection assembled over many years by the artist’s grandfather. The storage boxes—a set of 12—are handmade objects in which canvas is stretched over painted wood and combined with embroidered fabric and metal fittings. Each box bears a serial number and the artist’s signature on its back, and a certificate of authenticity was made for each of the twelve.

The act of housing and administering a collection is a relationship that demands ongoing maintenance and judgment from its owner. This work comes into being through the artist’s taking on that obligation and burden. After the owner’s death in 2024, and in keeping with the owner’s wishes, the boxes have been offered one at a time since ARTISTS’ FAIR KYOTO 2025. Buyers are asked to inherit this legacy together with the artist, in the form of an artwork. For this reason, not all of the boxes will be sold; some will remain in the artist’s hands. Showing what has been collected cannot be separated from continuing to hold it in trust.

A two-person exhibition of KURASHIKI Aya and GOTO Yumeno, held at Club Ouzoku, a nightclub near Bashamichi in Yokohama. Drawing on their own experiences and interviews with the club’s hostesses, and taking as their motif Queen Medb (Mab) of Celtic myth, associated with intoxication, the two presented their first collaborative work, painted in relay like an exchange of letters. Works questioning the preconceptions directed at women and the structures of society were placed in the club’s lavish interior, far removed from a white cube. On Sundays and holidays, outside business hours, the club was opened to the public free of charge without hostesses present; during business hours, visitors could also view the works while being served.

An artwork produced by reorganizing, relocating, rearranging, or otherwise acting upon objects belonging to any given location. The purchaser acquires not the work itself but the “right to make,” and receives a rights ticket and certificate. The rights holder may, with the artist’s consent, exercise the right to have the work realized at a designated location. Expenses, and the restoration of the site afterward, are borne by the person exercising the right. Upon realization, an anagram of the site’s name becomes the title for that state of the work, and the thermal-paper certificate is blackened with an iron. Up to five rights may be issued at any one time, each assigned a serial number.

What is handed over is not an object but the authority to bring a work into being, and the judgment of whether or not to exercise it.

A group exhibition at Komagome SOKO, co-curated with HARADA Mio. “(((((,” is read, for convenience, as kakko tojinai (“leaving the brackets unclosed”): a coined word of neatly lined-up brackets followed by a comma, carrying the sense of being open and of not drawing conclusions. With six artists approaching gender, sexuality, nationality, the body, and contemporary art itself, the exhibition sought to rethink social norms taken for granted. Artists: aliwen, URA Ayaka, OHASHI Tetsuro, KURASHIKI Aya, PARK Sanghyun, HIWA Kazuhiko

Two exhibitions curated by COM_COURSE as the FY2020 program of the ART369 Project in Nasushiobara, Tochigi. In “Intimate Path” (January–March 2021), “packages” containing a work by one of eight artists, together with related items and a message from the artist, were delivered to sixteen businesses along Prefectural Road 369, which lived with them at work or at home for about three weeks. Held under a state of emergency, it was a private, closed exhibition experienced only by the participating businesses. The following “from Intimate Path” (July–August 2021, ART369 space) showed the works together with the contents of the packages, attempting to carry the memory of the project outward in a different form. Artists: IWASAKI Kodai, OKUE Shun, KURASHIKI Aya, SHINODA Yu (first half); SHIMOYAMA Kentaro, TAJIKA Natsuko, FUJIBAYASHI Yu, MIWA Kyoko (second half).

An installation combining waste materials accumulated over years in the childhood home of an acquaintance, brought into the exhibition space and paired with a monologue playing throughout. The installation itself is not for sale; instead, the waste materials serving as its medium are sold at 131 yen per kilogram. The monologue begins with the circumstances that led to the accumulation of this waste, before moving through discourses on the difficulties and stress of ownership in society, voiced from multiple different perspectives. Leaning into their own situation and surroundings as the impetus for making, the artist presents the work as a temporary state, cut off by the duration of the exhibition.

In late 2017, the mural Kizuna (1977) by USAMI Keiji was discarded during the renovation of a student cafeteria at the University of Tokyo. This installation takes that incident as its central point of reference. A full-scale reproduction of Kizuna is suspended diagonally and unstably overhead, dominating the entire exhibition space. Under this pressure, performers intermittently address the burdens that assets impose. Multiple monologues on the nature of individual ownership circulate through the space. The accumulation of cultural value in the public sphere is always accompanied by questions of who decides, and who bears responsibility. Taking the disposal of an artwork as a case study, this installation interrogates the politics of such decisions and the question of where responsibility lies.

A video recording part of a three-hour session on the disposal of USAMI Keiji’s mural Kizuna. The four participants were neither parties to the incident nor experts, but were connected through a shared interest in art. It is a discourse born at the margins of the incident, in which each participant voices their own perspective. Filmed in conjunction with the exhibition Decision in the Hospice.

A text work in the form of instructions, made in 2020 for Project Le Bosquet, an exhibition project held in people’s homes and planned in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the project, viewers received print numbers for works on a website, printed them at convenience stores in Japan, and held an exhibition at home with the artists they chose. The work was made as a device for reconsidering what it means to sort things. The instructions are disclosed only to the purchaser.

Among the friends the artist had made while living in Tokyo were people from six countries: Japan, Korea, China, Austria, France, and the United Kingdom. A question that recurred among them was how each person—given their cultural background, social circumstances, and situation—might manage their own physical and mental health at any given time and place. The question had persisted in the artist’s mind, first in Japanese. Without arriving at any concrete answers, they brought it to each friend and asked them to render it in their own native language. Those translations were then inscribed into bars of soap. The soap and the tile carpet used as a support were both everyday objects repurposed from the artist’s home—not purchased for the work, but used as found and disposed of after the exhibition.

One of the artist’s folders on Google Drive, Google’s online cloud storage service. The folder contains several files, viewable by audiences through a shared link. Contents are updated irregularly—new images may be added, and existing ones deleted. Editing permissions are transferred as appropriate; those holding editing access may freely add or delete data from the folder. We can, at any time, together decide on a single value. A separate work from I(we) am(are) making a line #1, made of a different folder and shared link.

One of the artist’s folders on Google Drive, Google’s online cloud storage service. The folder contains several files, viewable by audiences through a shared link. Contents are updated irregularly—new images may be added, and existing ones deleted. Editing permissions are transferred as appropriate; those holding editing access may freely add or delete data from the folder. We can, at any time, together decide on a single value.

A life installation in which objects that have overflowed from domestic space are relocated to an exhibition venue, where they are continuously sorted and organized throughout the exhibition period. Items judged disposable are actually discarded after the exhibition closes; the remainder returns to everyday life. The first iteration was presented in 2017 as a graduation work in the Department of Oil Painting, Tokyo University of the Arts, at the 65th Tokyo University of the Arts Graduation and Completion Works Exhibition (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum). It received the department’s Graduation Work Grand Prize and was purchased by the University Art Museum, Tokyo University of the Arts. The work continues as an ongoing series, realized whenever a change in living situation coincides with an available exhibition.

Art finds it hard to let go of what it has once taken on. Turning this character back on the artist’s own life, the work was made not by producing anything new, but by re-sorting until the right amount remained.

What is exhibited is not only the objects that were chosen, but the time spent continuing to decide what to keep. A practice as archive, concerning the dual nature of wealth and debt, the provisional character of judgment, and the authority and urgency involved in choosing.

The artist began practicing the signing of artworks to overcome poor handwriting, eventually developing this act itself into an independent work. An ongoing series of variable works, each iteration is realized in materials and form determined by the exhibition context.

The title’s “His (Her)” brings together an awareness that the identity of a maker shapes how a work is perceived, and an engagement with debates around surname retention in marriage—the possibility that one’s own name, or a partner’s, may change.

In 2023, upon changing the artist name from “KUBOTA Tomohiro” to “KUBOTAOGUISS Tomohiro,” the artist practiced writing “Oguiss” anew and reconstructed the signature design. “Kubota” derives from the paternal family name and “Oguiss” from the maternal, a renaming that connects directly to the themes at the heart of this work.

A painting series produced against a background of Marshall McLuhan’s media theory. Scanning past drawings and found palettes, printing them at enlarged scale, and repeatedly applying paint while removing ink, the works compose surfaces where hand-drawing and mechanical reproduction, generation and erasure intermingle. The title derives from an association with McLuhan’s phrase “The medium is the massage,” carrying within it the suggestion of media’s unconscious reshaping of perception. The series led the artist to pursue a specialization in printmaking. At the same time, the experience of sorting and discarding both past works and household objects together in the 2017 graduation piece Temporary Disposal Inventory became a turning point connecting to the artist’s current practice around the indebtedness of artworks and the sorting of value.