Ebosi Yuasa｜Sea of Mud/Clod of Mud
Saturday, December 20, 2025 － Saturday, March 7, 2026
12:00-19:00
* Please note that the gallery will also be closed for the winter holidays from December 28, 2025 through January 12, 2026.
At Gallery Koyanagi, we are pleased to present Sea of Mud/Clod of Mud, the first solo exhibition by Ebosi Yuasa, from Saturday, December 20, 2025, to Saturday, March 7, 2026.
Born in 1983, Ebosi Yuasa took an unconventional path to becoming an artist. After graduating from university, he joined a financial firm that collapsed just six months later. The experience prompted him to enter art school with a firm resolve to become a painter. Through the writings of French literature scholar Tatsuhiko Shibusawa(1928–1987), he encountered Surrealism and developed a longing to inhabit the same era as the artists he admired. This impulse eventually led him to reinvent himself as “Yebosi Yuasa, a third-rate painter born in the Taisho era,” and to create paintings that emulate the styles of that period.
The fictional painter Yebosi Yuasa (1924–1987), whose persona the artist adopts, belongs to the generation that lived through the war. According to this constructed biography, he was unable to serve in the military due to a severe hernia and spent the wartime years in the countryside, where he was evacuated, enduring chronic shortages of supplies. Although he never experienced combat firsthand, Yebosi lived within the very center of that historical moment and was exposed daily to the reality of war. Like many people of the time, he likely felt relief at news of victory on some days and animosity toward enemy nations on others. Yet even as he was carried along by the atmosphere of the era, he simply continued to paint. Yebosi’s works bear, quietly and unmistakably, the “emotions of the era,” inscribed beyond any individual ideology or conviction. This exhibition presents ten paintings attributed to Yebosi, all relating to the theme of war. Three of the works were previously shown in the 2025 group exhibition Layers of Accumulated Time: Depicting the World We Live In at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, while the remaining seven are new works created specifically for this presentation.
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The Boy depicts a solitary young man standing in a barren landscape. His somewhat vacant expression hints at the fate awaiting young men who wore special attack uniforms. Beyond a murky brown sea, factory-like structures emerge through the haze. Yuasa explains that “the side where the boy stands is the other world, while beyond the sea is this world.” The model for the boy is, in fact, a clay doll from the wartime period that Yuasa owns, and the plants and buildings in the background were composed by combining visual references from the same era or earlier. Looking back at Japanese art history, numerous paintings from around the 1950s sought to preserve painful memories of the war by depicting wounded or deformed bodies. In this context, The Boy may be understood as the “landscape with the dead” that Yebosi—who remained on the home front—was finally able to paint. The work seems to carry the deep pain and heavy silence that settled within those who lived through the postwar years.
The exhibition title is drawn from the clay doll and the murky sea depicted in The Boy. The two phrases “clod of mud” and “sea of mud” symbolize both the turbulent currents of an era, as witnessed by someone who did not go to war, and the memories retrieved from within that flow.
Also on view are works that depict the “echoes of war” from various perspectives, including Pseudo Marshal, which portrays a figure whose chest gleams with medals even as his face appears comical, and Health Above All, a satirical treatment of postwar Japan’s growing obsession with health.
On the opening day, Saturday, December 20, the artist will be present from 17:00 to 19:00 for a reception. A conversation with a guest speaker is also planned during the exhibition. Further details will be announced once they are confirmed.
Additionally, from Thursday, December 25, to Thursday, April 2, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo will present MOT Collection 30th Anniversary Exhibit, Multiple Self-portraits, an exhibition marking the museum’s 30th anniversary. The exhibition will feature works by Ebosi Yuasa from the museum’s collection, along with new paintings by Yuasa and wartime materials from the Meiji through Showa periods that he has collected. We hope you will have the opportunity to see both exhibitions.
