Image: Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki
The Ohara Museum of Art in Kurashiki will open a major exhibition of work by Japanese-style painter Mayuko Ose on July 15, 2026, presenting the results of her artist-in-residence stay through September 27. The museum says the display will feature a nearly 5-meter-wide painting made during Ose’s residency at the former atelier of Kojima Torajiro in Sakaizu, using research she carried out across Okayama Prefecture.
The project is part of ARKO, short for Artist in Residence Kurashiki, Ohara, a residency program run by the museum that invites selected artists to live and work in Kurashiki for up to three months before showing the completed work. According to the museum’s project page, ARKO began in 2005, has hosted 18 artists so far, and was restarted in 2025 as one of the institution’s “artist collaboration” initiatives. The program is linked to both the reuse of Muimura-sō and the museum’s aim to strengthen ties between artists and the institution.
Ose, born in 1996 in Kanagawa Prefecture and a 2020 graduate of Tama Art University’s graduate program in Japanese painting, is known for paintings of collective human figures that draw on the flat pictorial treatment of nihonga and references to Japanese graphic design. Her recent work has focused on animalistic and savage aspects of human nature, a concern the museum says informs the current exhibition.
The featured painting is described as a large-scale work that brings together vividly colored anonymous figures and a range of motifs. The museum says those elements connect reality and fiction while questioning the boundary between human beings and wild animals. The work was created in the large studio built in 1927 on the grounds where Kojima Torajiro worked from 1912 onward; the studio was later used by ARKO artists as a production site.
The exhibition will be on view in the Ohara Museum of Art’s Main Building, Room 7. Museum information lists opening hours from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with last admission at 4:30 p.m., and notes that the exhibition can be seen with the museum’s standard admission ticket. For the duration of the exhibition, regular museum admission also covers the Main Building, the Crafts and Oriental Art Wing, and the Kojima Torajiro Memorial Hall.
An artist talk by Ose is scheduled for September 6, 2026, from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. in the same room. Admission to the talk is free with a museum ticket, and no advance reservation is required. The exhibition is organized by the Ohara Art Foundation’s Ohara Museum of Art and Ohara Art Research Institute, with support from the Kurare Foundation and cooperation from Caesar Art.
