Kenjiro Okazaki

Never could be any other way — anagnorisis

On View
Jun 5 – Aug 7, 2026
London

Pace will present Kenjiro Okazaki’s first-ever solo exhibition in the UK at its London gallery from June 5 to August 7. Titled Never could be any other way — anagnorisis, the presentation brings together sculptures, large-scale paintings, and a selection of the artist’s delicately framed Zero Thumbnail series.

The first part of the exhibition’s title, “Never could be any other way”, 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).

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. Central to his practice is the concept of zōkei (plastic arts): the making of form from substance. Asserting that our engagement with the universe is as malleable as the materials that constitute it, Okazaki positions zōkei as a practice through which perception and the world itself are brought into relation.

The artist’s theoretical project draws on mathematics, quantum physics, art history, poetry, music, and literature. At its center is a conception of time as a constraint—one that art makes visible in order to overcome it. This idea was already central to Okazaki’s practice well before his stroke in 2021 and the six months of rehabilitation that followed; that experience gave it new concreteness. For Okazaki, rehabilitation is not the recovery of lost movement, but the discovery, after the fact, that the movement was there all along.

Okazaki produces his multi-panel abstract paintings—figuring in this exhibition as diptychs and quadriptychs—using richly hued acrylic paints, thickly daubed onto the surface. As with the work of Paul Cézanne, a key source of inspiration for the artist, the gaps between brushstrokes emphasize that their proximity is contingent and open. Each island-like block of color is created within a single unit of continuous time, while the intervals between their making can vary from half a day to several months. Okazaki calls these units of color “giornata” (a day’s work), borrowing the Italian term used in buon fresco painting to describe how much work can be completed in a single day.

At first glance, the paintings’ clusters of color, texture, and shape appear distinct and independent. Through sustained looking, mirrored gestures and complementary or analogous color combinations map relationships across the panels, unfolding into an ever-expanding set of possibilities.

This relational logic extends beyond the visual field and into language. Okazaki’s long, narrative titles—often assuming poetic or fragmentary literary form—further expand the paintings’ potential for meaning. As the artist has explained, the titles belong to an “expressive sequence distinct from that of the work itself, functioning to subject the visual to the order of language.” For Okazaki, the encounter between two autonomous sequences—the visual and the textual—interrupts their internal logic and, in doing so, produces a “network structure” of meaning.

A selection of small-scale paintings from Okazaki’s Zero Thumbnail body of work, begun in 2005, will also be included in the exhibition. Working within a fixed scale and format, these condensed compositions allow for a wide range of painterly decisions. In some works, thin coats of paint create a near-translucent effect; in others, the acrylic’s jelly-like viscosity evokes a tactile sensation, as if the viewer’s own hands were implicated in the painting’s creation. The wooden frames Okazaki makes for the Zero Thumbnail works—marked by cut apertures and pronounced variations in grain—are conceived in direct relation to the compositions they enclose. In dialogue with the paintings, the frames both extend and compress the artist’s gestures. At an intimate scale, the works articulate the visual intensity of Okazaki’s practice.

Three sculptures, including one made this year, will also feature in the exhibition. These large, resin and synthetic marble forms possess an organic, almost fleshy sense of motion. Bearing the marks of manipulation—compression, expansion, contraction, and fracture—the sculptures give material form to a foundational principle of Okazaki’s work: the making of form from substance.

The Discovery of Art: Conditions for Living in the AI Era, Okazaki’s forthcoming book examining art through the lens of AI and the Socratic method, will be published by Film Art-sha on June 26. Concurrent with the exhibition in London, his solo presentation, Tender Buttons, opens at the Naoshima New Museum of Art on the island of Naoshima in Japan, on June 7. Later this year, the artist will unveil Nakatsukuni Lykeion, a new museum in Haizuka (Shōbara, Hiroshima Prefecture), Japan. The museum builds upon the Haizuka Earthwork Projects, initiated in 1994, and will include Tsukuyomi-dō (Chapelle Lunette), a pavilion designed by Okazaki. Nakatsukuni Lykeion is shaped by the same principles as Okazaki’s theoretical project, placing rehabilitation theory into practice alongside art, ecology, and learning.

Et egredietur virga de radice Iesse, et flos de radice eius ascendet. And for all this, nature is never spent. Generations have trod, have trod, have trod. I got old. Landscape plotted and pieced — Off side of my thought? fold, fallow, and plough. /...

(Left) Amid the sea's savage darkness, the little bird glimpsed a single piercing ray of light. What could it be? / Awakened, it flew through the storm. Fish enduring these raging waters, seem stronger, wiser than humans. Beyond twenty feet, wave-...

The Kingfisher flew vigorously, her wings strong. She had rested in the quiet ark, consuming provisions. Upward she snared, beyond clouds, into blue ether above. Suddenly, her gray plumage transformed to brilliant blue, colored by the clear heights...

"You don't see far, and you don't see clearly," said the Moon, "In the little petty whirl here below." Lute strings trembled moonlight. Gossamer threads caught starlight. Moments dissolved beneath crystal waters. "She wept for the world's depravity,...

“How beautiful—this life remembered later.” Empty market. Acacia shade swaying, a Samaritan, donkey in hand. JUSSIT NAVES AEDIFICARE. Stubble fields, sun-roasted red locusts cry like heavy rain, crickets shriek. / Fleeing fiery broom of heat. Market...

light wavered in mirror of green water. a place left, slightly absurd. As if sunk to seafloor, The wind rises! shifting fallen leaves onto others, ET HIC TRANSIERUNT FLUMEN COSNONIS. / Grimace of weeping folds into a thousand creases, astonishment...

That summer, thistle-overrun. Just here. That moment returning. Weeds breeding their foolishness. Only to the dying eye is nature beautiful. / August, a monstrous burdock. Silence seizes her sleep. Half-beast cry, pipe-like bronchus trembling. So the...

Aunt’s house sunk in foliage, fence-top globes—rose, green, violet. Luminous, perfect worlds, no soap bubble achieves. ISTI MIRANT STELLA. / “Were you there?” Filtered through garden-green—found in mildew-eaten, sight-dimming hall, that long-...

Each page burned, golden pears swooning. Pomona returned from morning's blaze. "Such a queer dream. Listen…" Cherries water-clear, beyond taste. / A square of light, dreaming. Again with mother through the gold square, swept clean. Thorned acacias,...

I Was Once a Horse, My Body, Now Decaying Timber. Bees Build Hives on What Remains. / 吞噬你们蜂巢的，正是我，这头熊 / Forgive Me. Can My Tears Repay? As Honey's Sweetness Returned, the Bear Smiled One Last Time. by Kenjiro Okazaki

They never seemed to move slowly. / 犀牛転地，泥涂其身 / Call me the tumbling dice by Kenjiro Okazaki

The night is darkening round me/Clouds beyond clouds above me/行到水窮處，坐看雲起時 by Kenjiro Okazaki

Rich tusks from ancestry / 六牙白象 Chaddanta Hatthī / Saw them off before I die by Kenjiro Okazaki

The Origin of Geometry/ Sed et lamiae nudaverunt mammam, lactaverunt catulos suos; filia populi mei crudelis quasi struthio in deserto /Howiesons Poort Ostrich Eggshell by Kenjiro Okazaki

Nightingale with Drops of His Heart's Blood Had Nourished the Red Rose / Gul-o-Bulbul / Αἰθυσσομένων Φύλλων Κῶμα Κατάρρει by Kenjiro Okazaki

Oueral enker grene / A spetos sparþe to expoun in spelle, quoso myȝt / Blod blykked on þe grene by Kenjiro Okazaki

’Scuse me while I kiss the sky / Stanza my stone / At the violet hour, things just don’t seem the same, acting funny by Kenjiro Okazaki

An airy spirit has no shadow / God’s lioness / The child’s cry melts in the wall. I am the arrow. by Kenjiro Okazaki

As if moving, as if not / 살풀이춤 salpuri-chum / Carrying a piece of happiness by Kenjiro Okazaki

Till I end my song ― say the bells of Westminster / Full fathom five / Mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up by Kenjiro Okazaki

‎‎Pitch flows seaward / what the fish swallow, they return as ambergris / Tyrian Purple / كَسَرَابٍ بِقِيعَةٍ‎ by Kenjiro Okazaki

Kenjiro Okazaki_Official Portrait — © Risaku Suzuki

About the Artist

With a unifying emphasis on form, Kenjiro Okazaki explores themes related to time, space, and the human experience through a postmodernist lens. In the vein of artists such as Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Paul Klee, Tomoyoshi Murayama, Filippo Brunelleschi, and John Cage, Okazaki’s work is rooted in an investigation of the perception and reconstruction of time. In addition to his artistic practice, he is a critic renowned for his efforts in redefining abstraction. Over the course of his four-decade career, his richly varied oeuvre has cemented the artist as an important voice in the cultural landscape of Japan and beyond.

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