Storytelling
ASANO Miyabi, KATO Megumi, masuda aoi, Morisakorisa, Suzuki Nina
aaploit is pleased to present Storytelling, a group exhibition of five artists: Asano Miyabi, Kato Megumi, Suzuki Nina, masuda aoi, and Morisakorisa, from Friday, October 16 to Sunday, October 25, 2026.
Companies speak of their purpose; products come with backstories about where they came from. Storytelling today is a marketing technique, a way for companies to address the customers they have in mind.
Storytelling ordinarily requires someone who tells and someone who listens. In this exhibition, no one is telling.
The five artists work with news reporting, film, bookbinding, fragments of ruins, and memory held in the body, all forms in which the author does not step forward. That is precisely why these forms have been received without anyone asking who was speaking.
Suzuki draws on Miki Shigeo's notion of "life memory," the idea that the course of evolution remains inscribed in the body, in paintings that reach toward sensations that come before language. The artist's coinage "Neo-Primatus (New Primates)" is named in the form of a scientific name, yet no taxonomy is given for it.
Asano makes the very forms of fact. There is a newspaper reporting an incident that never happened, and a manga said to have been inspired by that incident. Works that wear the face of the one doing the referring pile up on one another, yet their point of origin is shown nowhere.
The images masuda aoi draws images like illustrations without a text. Bound as a book, the plates invite the viewer to read them in order, but when the reading ends is left to the viewer.
The scenes Morisakorisa paints call stories to mind, yet they only show what is there; they never say why they are being shown.
Kato makes frescoes, a medium said to retain its original appearance for a thousand years. What appears in them are characters that may well be forgotten within a few years. Presented as fragments, the works evoke relics unearthed at an excavation.
This exhibition considers storytelling without a storyteller. We invite you to read these stories whose narrator is absent.
We look forward to your visit.
Storytelling
- Dates
- October 16 – November 1, 2026
- Hours
- Friday, Saturday, Sunday 13:00–18:00 Viewings by appointment available on other days
- Venue
- aaploit, Tokyo
Artists
ASANO Miyabi
b. 2000
Asano Miyabi works in oil painting and installation, addressing the asymmetry of the gaze as it has persisted throughout Western art history. Adopting the compositions of Titian and Palma il Vecchio, she mischievously subverts the sexual and economic structures that classical painting concealed beneath mythological rhetoric. Her work is grounded in sustained dialogue with sex workers, confronting their lived experiences. At the root of her practice is anger toward the misogyny that pervades both art history and contemporary society. MFA, Aichi University of the Arts. Born in 2000 in Aichi, Japan.
KATO Megumi
b. 2003
Kato Megumi works across painting, low relief, and installation, building situations that involve the viewer's bodily sense of space. Through familiar, approachable imagery, she examines time, memory, and the relation between fiction and reality.
Recent group exhibitions include Pure Duration, Gallery hazi, Iwakura, Aichi (2025) and Cream Soda, Melting, a curated project at Gallery New Ginzado, Gifu (2024). Kato took part in the Sakushima Project, and the work is permanently installed on the island.
BFA in Oil Painting, Aichi University of the Arts; currently enrolled in the MFA program in Painting, Tokyo University of the Arts. Born 2003 in Gifu, Japan.
masuda aoi
Though it forms the self, the body cannot be grasped as a whole. This unknowing unfolds into prints, paintings, artist's books made down to the binding, and small sculptures. The face appears across media. On surfaces mirrored left to right, like a solid's net laid flat, the face holds both what is known and what is not. Currently enrolled in the Painting Major at Tokyo Zokei University. Selected exhibitions include *Peering into Poroporo* (Bunbodo Gallery, Tokyo, 2026) and *Nonet* (Shinjuku Ophthalmologist Gallery, Tokyo, 2026).
Morisakorisa
b. 2003
Morisakorisa paints a parallel world that exists in the mind. Ideas gathered from reality are carried across into the imagined world, lending fiction a reality of its own. Each picture opens as the beginning of a story.
Born in 2003 in Tokyo. BFA in Oil Painting, Tama Art University, 2026. Recent solo exhibition: Sunny, Gallery Dalston, Tokyo, 2026. Selected for FACE2022.
Suzuki Nina
Suzuki Nina's subject is a memory that belongs not to the individual but to the species: the "life memory" accumulated in the body since deep time. She builds her surfaces from transparent gel medium, applied layer upon layer, so that the sediment of memory becomes the physical depth of paint. Working from Neo-Primatus, a recurring figure that holds both the origins and the future of humankind, she develops serial works that open a return to the human before personhood.
Currently enrolled in the master's program in painting at Tohoku University of Art and Design. Awards include the Grand Prix at Bijutsu Shinjinsho Debut 2026, the Newcomer Selection Grand Prize at the 17th Spring Niki Exhibition, and the Excellence Award and Liquitex Award at the TUAD Graduation Exhibition 2025. Recipient of the Kamiyama Foundation Art Support Program (13th cohort) and the Nitta Art Scholarship (5th cohort).