Liminal Yoshikatsu Ikeuchi Exhibition
Date: October 13th (Tuesday) – October 25th (Sunday), 2026
Closed on October 19th (Monday)
Opening hours : 10:00–18:00 (last entry 17:30)
Venue: Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art, Main Building
Free admission
About
About the exhibition
The Yoshikatsu Ikeuchi Exhibition Executive Committee (Cultural Policy Division, Department of Culture and Life, Kyoto Prefecture) will hold the "Liminal Yoshikatsu Ikeuchi Exhibition" at the Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art as an initiative to promote new cultural values in Kyoto. Born in Kyoto Prefecture, Yoshikatsu Ikeuchi has been engrossed in drawing, making music, and expressing himself since childhood, and began his creative activities in earnest in high school. In 2016, he composed the music for the film "Rage," for which Ryuichi Sakamoto composed the score. While continuing his musical activities, he has also worked on paintings and three-dimensional works, creating while moving back and forth between visual expression and music. Since presenting his paintings online and in exhibitions, he has quickly garnered attention not only in Japan but also around the world, and his activities are expanding further, with exhibitions already being held in Asian countries. This exhibition will be a valuable opportunity to experience Ikeuchi's multifaceted talent, which is currently quietly captivating people around the world, in a space enveloped in natural light.
Artist Statement
Artist Statement
Between the act of seeing and the act of hearing, there are some things that do not translate. A color cannot replace a specific sound, or vice versa. While sound dissipates in time, a painting remains where it is, as a mark. The relationship arising between the two is not predetermined, but reshaped with each look or listen.
The more closely we are involved with a thing, the harder it is to assign it a single meaning. Light moving through the venue over time slowly alters the look of the whole, as if passing between sound and paintings. Rather than merging different kinds of expression into one, in this exhibition I take the conditions that give rise to such changes, and composes them as works.
Critical Foreword
Exhibition introduction | Hiroki Yamamoto (Cultural Researcher)
In Yoshikatsu Ikeuchi, the production of paintings and music are intimately connected, yet at the same time exist independently of one another. For Ikeuchi both are creative, expressive endeavors that have been constant companions since childhood. Yet he also stresses that they are not mutually translatable formats, and his works do not simply convert painting to music, or vice versa. Instead he prefers to explore what he calls the interchangeability gap between them, that is, those parts that defy translation. In “Liminal” too, the visual (images) and aural (sounds) he creates are autonomous yet resonant with each other, resonant yet autonomous.
Ikeuchi’s paintings are generally classed as figurative, involving as they do specific images. Which may surprise, considering they are the work of an artist so profoundly involved in formless, acoustic sensation. However Ikeuchi views painting as “a transitory gateway to the act of seeing.” His images are not a perfect proxy for the sensations of their creator, and so his paintings do not take abstract form. Studying Ikeuchi’s works, the viewer is struck by an odd sensation: what at first seem readily recognizable, quotidian motifs, gradually morph into something far less familiar. Such perceptual misalignment draws our
