Featuring works by Kyoko Imazu, Umi Ishihara, and Ana Scripcariu-Ochiai. Curated by Hina Omukai.

1-23 May 2025

Opening celebration Thursday 1 May, 5-7pm

Remote Sensing explores the evolving nature of Japanese art in a globally connected world. Far from monolithic, contemporary Japanese art today reflects a diversity of voices shaped by diasporic lives, local traditions, and international perspectives. The exhibition brings together three early-to-mid-career Japanese artists from different parts of the world whose practices are deeply rooted in personal narratives and transnational experiences.

These artists challenge conventional understandings of contemporary Japanese art, demonstrating how identity, place, and culture resonate within a globalised artistic landscape. They draw on deeply personal histories to craft works that navigate themes of belonging, community, and connection. In the unique context of Melbourne, these intimate explorations create a dialogue that bridges distance—both physical and cultural—and invites viewers to reconsider what it means to represent “Japanese art” in today’s interconnected world.

Kyoko Imazu

Kyoko Imazu, a Melbourne-based Japanese artist, explores the narratives of often-overlooked elements of our daily lives through diverse mediums like printmaking, puppetry, installation, bookbinding, and ceramics.

Her work tells the stories of our often-overlooked neighbors like the weeds, bugs and pebbles that fill our everyday lives. Upon closer inspection, every petal, leaf and wing is miraculously unique; they all have their own stories and universes within themselves, containing many states of life, death and regeneration. She combines her own stories and memories with the stories of these tiny neighbors to try to make sense of the world we live in and imagine the worlds we cannot see with our own eyes.

Her works are held in prestigious collections such as the National Gallery of Australia, National Library of Australia, and State Libraries of Queensland and Victoria, among others, and are frequently exhibited nationally and internationally.

Umi Ishihara

Umi Ishihara is an artist and filmmaker from Tokyo based in London.

She creates experimental narrative films that weave together personal memories with broader social issues. Her work delves deeply into themes of politics, community, and the sense of alienation that often permeates various social classes. She frequently collaborates with non-professional actors—local residents and people from her immediate surroundings.

Her work has been shown and screened in museums and film festivals worldwide, including IMA Brisbane, The Centre Pompidou, ICA London, BFI Southbank, South London Gallery, International Film Festival Rotterdam, CPH:DOC, The National Museum of Art Osaka, Fukuoka Art Museum and Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. She was selected Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2019 and Awarded GQ Global Creativity Awards 2024.

Ana Scripcariu-Ochiai

Born in 1992 in Saitama Prefecture, Japan, Ana Scripcariu-Ochiai is a mixed-media artist who sensitively explores ways of taking root in her two home countries—Japan and Romania—under the theme “connections between land and people.” She conducts cultural and anthropological fieldwork, including the documentation of indigenous festivals and folk religions in various regions of Japan and abroad.

Ana Scripcariu-Ochiai holds a Ph.D. in sculpture from Tokyo University of the Arts.

She has exhibited in Japan and internationally, including at The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Japan (2023, 2020–2021); The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Romania (2020); Hoi An, Vietnam (2019); Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Japan (2019); and Chambord, Paris, France (2017), among others.

Major awards include ARTnews Japan “30 ARTISTS U35” (2022), the Washida Meruro Prize at the “TERRADA ART AWARD 2021,” and Forbes Japan “30 UNDER 30” (2020). In 2023, she conducted research in Romania as an overseas research fellow of the Pola Art Foundation.