Image: Toshiya Takahama, "Black Diary," circa 2020–present, print book, artist's collection. Meguro Museum of Art, Tokyo
Meguro Museum of Art is showing 'Toshiya Takahama: Meguro de ieatsume' from June 27 to August 30, 2026, bringing together the copperplate printmaker’s engravings, participatory installations and school-based collaborations around the theme of 'ieatsume,' or the gathering of houses. The exhibition runs at the museum in Meguro City, Tokyo, and is organized by the Meguro City Arts and Culture Promotion Foundation and Meguro Museum of Art, with support from the Kitano Lifelong Education Promotion Foundation.
The exhibition is built around Takahama’s long-running practice of linking printmaking to carpentry, social exchange and local materials. According to the museum, after studying art he worked in joinery while continuing to make copperplate prints, and the squared forms and straight lines of architectural drawing gradually entered his graphic compositions. Over time, these elements led him toward house as a central motif. The museum describes 'ieatsume' as a way of working that brings together making prints, traveling to different places and collaborating with people encountered there.
A key point of reference in the exhibition is Takahama’s participation in the 2006 Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, where he and Sotaro Ide presented the vacant-house project 'Koide no House.' During that project, local children began building a town from leftover wood, and Takahama later developed workshops in Japan and abroad in which participants create streetscapes from blocks of wood. The museum notes that its own workshop was used for such a program in spring 2009. The exhibition text also links this practice to Takahama’s idea that 'printmaking is to imprint society.'
The gallery features copperplate works from Takahama’s early period through new works, alongside a town made of blocks that he created with children as part of a class program at Shimomeguro Elementary School, adjacent to the museum. Prints by the children on the themes of houses and towns are also shown. The museum says the display allows visitors to encounter Takahama’s work not only as finished images but also through the social process of building and revising shared forms.
One of the exhibition’s main works, 'Black Diary,' can be handled and its pages turned by visitors in the gallery as part of the show’s participatory format. The museum adds that damaged copies touched by visitors may be repaired in a workshop space when Takahama is present at the museum, allowing audiences to observe conservation as part of the exhibition experience. The museum also presents the project as cyclical: the town installation will be dismantled after the exhibition and reused at another venue to become a new town.
The museum has also announced a program of related events, including daily hands-on sessions called the 'ieatsume project' on most afternoons during the run, gallery tours for schools and groups on selected dates, an artist talk on July 5 and an online-linked talk on August 8 tied to the concurrently held Ochiishi Plan project. Those dates have passed; still to come is an adult art café conversation between the curator and the artist on Saturday August 22, 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. Opening hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., with last admission at 5:30 p.m.; admission is 900 yen for adults, 700 yen for university students, high school students and visitors aged 65 and over, and free for junior high school students and younger.
Takahama’s practice extends beyond Meguro. Ochiishi Plan Phase 16, ‘Scar Repair – The Art of Mending,’ ran from August 7 to 11, 2026 at the former Ochiishi Radio Transmitting Station in Nemuro, Hokkaido, organised by the Ochiishi Plan Executive Committee. Meguro Museum of Art relayed that project’s gallery talk from the site to its own workshop room and online on Saturday August 8, with the etcher Sotaro Ide and Takahama speaking from Ochiishi and the painter O JUN as guest. The exhibition itself closes on Sunday August 30.
