Exhibition Walkthrough with Professor Bert Winther-Tamaki

Events

Mud, Abstraction, and Language

Appreciations of Kenjiro Okazaki’s new work and memories of his early development

Friday, June 5, 2026
4 PM
5 Hanover Square
London

EVENT DETAILS

Friday, Jun 5, 2026
4 PM
5 Hanover Square
London

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To celebrate the opening of Kenjiro Okazaki’s first-ever exhibition in the UK, Professor Bert Winther-Tamaki will lead a special exhibition tour of Never could be any other way — anagnorisis as part of London Gallery Weekend’s Central London day.

Okazaki is an acclaimed artist, architect, and theorist whose multifarious practice spans painting, sculpture, robotics, costume and set design, and architecture. One of Japan’s leading contemporary artists, he examines the relationship between temporality and human perception.

The presentation in London brings together sculptures, large-scale paintings, and a selection of Okazaki’s delicately framed Zero Thumbnail series. “Never could be any other way,” the first part of the exhibition’s title, is the phrase inscribed in the run-out groove of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), buried in the infinite loop after “A Day in the Life.” The second part, anagnorisis (ἀναγνώρισις), is Aristotle’s term from the Poetics for the moment of tragic recognition—the retroactive discovery that what has happened could only have happened this way. Both name the same structure, which is the central thesis of Okazaki’s forthcoming book The Discovery of Art: Conditions for Living in the AI Era (Film Art-sha, June 2026).

Bert Winther-Tamaki

Bert Winther-Tamaki is an art historian specializing in the art and visual culture of modern and contemporary Japan. He is the author of four books, most recently TSUCHI: Earthy Materials in Contemporary Japanese Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), and numerous journal articles and chapters. Professor of Art History at the University of California, Irvine, Winther-Tamaki is currently Academic Associate at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures (SISJAC) in Norwich, UK. Concurrently, he is working on a book titled Promethean Excesses of Contemporary Japanese Art in the Bubble, an ecocritical view of Japanese art during the 1980s and 1990s.