Twilight
2026.9.25 (FRI) – 2026.11.8 (SUN)
Shota Yamauchi has explored the relationship between the self and the world through installations combining sculpture and video, while moving across a wide range of media including performance and scent.
In recent years—through works such as a performance distilling sweat into a "juice of scent" (Kyoto Experiment 2023) and a performance/installation depicting the preservation and exchange of scent in a future where body odor has been lost (YCAM, 2025)—he has deepened his interest in what emerges from the body, in bodily sensation, and in what is exchanged between oneself and others.
For this exhibition, Yamauchi presents a new installation comprising sculptures inspired by sauna stoves, a body sculpture, and the new video work Twilight.
The starting point of this exhibition lies in Yamauchi's experience of the sauna, which he has come to frequent in recent years.
Strangers gather in a single enclosed space, enveloped in heat and steam, sweating and breathing together.
In this scene, Yamauchi finds the strangeness of a ritual suddenly surfacing within everyday life—a spiritual quality that is also somehow comical.
As thought gradually recedes in the heat and bodily sensation comes to the fore, he says, a sense of sharing the same state begins to emerge, even among people who do not know one another.
The exhibition brings together sculptures inspired by the form of sauna stoves, a body sculpture with its arms raised high as if to emphasize the armpits, and the new video work Twilight.
Mist is released from the sculptures, gradually transforming the exhibition space itself into a sauna-like environment.
In the video, figures appear immersed in a hot, humid environment. Whether this is a distant past or a future yet to come remains uncertain.
There, acts that echo the sauna as we know it today are repeated: people expose their bodies to heat, sweat, and are enveloped in rising steam.
As these acts recur, the boundary between daily habit and ritual gradually blurs.
Verbal communication recedes into the background, while sweat, breath, and humidity slowly synchronize the states of those present.
In time, the body itself begins to resemble a sauna—an entity that generates heat and cools itself, over and over again.
Twilight, the title of the exhibition, refers to the dim interval between day and night.
As light fades, the contours of things and the distances between them gradually lose their certainty, and boundaries that once seemed to separate one thing from another become harder to discern.
This overlaps with the sensation, inside a sauna, of the distinctions dissolving between oneself, the surrounding heat and humidity, and the presence of strangers.
Is it the air that is hot, or is it my own body? Is the sweat running down my skin my own, or part of the moisture filling the room?
As such distinctions gradually lose their meaning, the exhibition depicts a landscape in which the boundary between the body and what lies beyond it slowly comes undone.
Artist: 山内祥太 / Shota Yamauchi
Dates / 会期: 2026.9.25 (FRI) – 2026.11.8 (SUN)
Opening Reception: 2026.9.25 (FRI) 18:00–21:00
Design: Heijiro Yagi
@heijiroyagi
at: CON_(4F)@con_tokyo_
maruka 4F, 2-2-14 Nihonbashi Bakurocho, Chuoku, Tokyo