Matter
Matter (Tokyo)
Matter is an artist-run platform and gallery. From 2022 to 2023, it operated a physical space in Tokyo, and it now functions as a nomadic gallery based in London without a fixed location. Matter aims to create an environment where artists are free to experiment, while exploring new relationships within urban and social contexts. Adapting its form flexibly to suit the moment, Matter engages in curated exhibitions and international art fairs, fostering experimental practices and new dialogues within contemporary art.
Proposal
At SWAB, Matter presents a compelling group exhibition featuring Schoko Tanaka, Kenji Sakai, and Martí Sawe. This presentation explores the visual languages shaped by street culture, personal memory, and contemporary systems. Tanaka translates the energetic essence of mural-making into vivid, symbolic canvas works that foster dialogue. Sakai utilizes quiet geometric forms to visualize the invisible structures between the self and others. Sawe injects the raw energy and visual noise of the city into abstract, playful experimentation. Together, their diverse practices intersect to create a dynamic, multi-angled conversation within the booth.
Schoko Tanaka spent a part of her childhood overseas, an experience that has profoundly shaped the foundation of her artistic practice. Self-taught in painting, textiles, ceramics, and other media, she has continually expanded her means of expression. Influenced in particular by the public engagement of Mexico’s muralism movement and the corporeality of street culture, she places mural-making at the core of her creative process. Her works, often composed in vivid colors and featuring symbolic motifs such as horses, snakes, plants, and human figures, function as a personal form of language as well as a medium for dialogue with others. In addition to creating murals for institutions such as the Embassy of Mexico in Japan and various overseas sites, she has collaborated with brands both in Japan and internationally.
Kenji Sakai (b. 1996, Kyoto) is an artist and the director of MATTER, whose practice spans various media, including painting, printmaking, and sculpture. Based in Tokyo and London, he uses his personal experiences and reactions as a starting point to reconsider the “relationship between the individual and the whole,” seeking to capture the orders and rules that lie between the self and others. Finding beauty in silence and emptiness, his style is characterized by the expression of inner memories and personal mutations sedimented within the self, using visual elements such as geometric forms and rhythm. Through bodily sensations, he questions the invisible structures that lie between opposing systems, visualizing them into quiet and multi-angled expressions.
Martí Sawe (Barcelona 1986) has forged a prolific and persistent career in the world of graffiti since 2001. His name has become a reference in this subculture, leaving its mark in numerous exhibitions and on walls around the world. After graduating from the illustration course at La Massana in 2006 and working in illustration and animation, he fully focused on his artistic career in 2017 following his first solo exhibition in New York. Mainly working with painting and drawing, his practice explores the tension between control and uncontrol, combining virtuous details with scribbles, figuration with disfigurement, and flat colors with accidental textures. His work carries the energy, rawness and spontaneity of the street, while reflecting the visual noise and information overload of contemporary life.
