YAMADARTは、9月12日から11月29日まで、KINJOによる個展「Still Warm」を開催いたします。
KINJO（1990年生まれ）は、東京出身で沖縄にルーツを持ち、日本と関わりの深いアメリカ文化や、自身が育った環境を題材に、絵画や立体、パフォーマンスを発表しています。幼少期に触れたスケートボードや米軍払い下げ品に描かれた、蛇、骸骨、ナイフ、シリアルパッケージなどの鮮烈な図像が表現の原点であり、代表的な作品「暗闇に光る目」は、幼い頃に感じていた他者の視線への恐怖から生まれています。
本展「Still Warm」は、立ち上る湯気が輪郭を失ったあとも熱を残すように、画面に重ねられた絵具や消えきらない痕跡が、かつてそこにあったイメージの熱を留めることに由来します。描くこと、消すこと、を繰り返すなかで、対象の輪郭は次第にぼやけ、やがてアーティスト自身の記憶や感情を映し出す、個人的な存在へと変化していきます。
本展は、石川県山中温泉で過ごした時間を起点としながら、その土地や風景を直接記録するものではありません。そこで触れたものや身体に残った感覚を、描く、消す、覆うという行為を通して画面へと落とし込み、作品のなかになお残り続ける「まだ冷めきらない熱」として捉えようとする試みです。
YAMADART is pleased to present Still Warm, a solo exhibition by KINJO, on view from September 12 through November 29, 2026.
KINJO (b. 1990) is a Tokyo-born artist with roots in Okinawa whose practice spans painting, sculpture, and performance. His work draws upon the complex presence of American culture in Japan, as well as the visual and social environment that shaped his childhood. Among the recurring sources in his work are images encountered through skateboarding culture and U.S. military surplus goods—snakes, skulls, knives, cereal packaging, and other charged motifs. His emblematic image of “eyes glowing in the dark” similarly emerges from an early fear of being watched, transforming a private childhood sensation into a persistent visual motif.
The title Still Warm refers to a residual state: the heat that remains after rising steam has dispersed and its contours have disappeared. This condition finds a parallel in KINJO’s paintings, where layers of pigment, partially erased forms, and traces that resist disappearance retain something of the intensity of images that once occupied the surface.
Through repeated acts of painting, erasing, and obscuring, the contours of his subjects gradually become unstable. As recognizable forms recede, they begin to operate less as depictions of external objects than as vessels for memory, perception, and emotion. What remains is not the image in its original state, but a more personal presence shaped by the accumulation and removal of marks.
Still Warm takes as its point of departure the period KINJO spent in Yamanaka Onsen, Ishikawa. The works, however, should not be understood as direct representations or records of the region and its landscape. Rather, the artist translates encounters, impressions, and bodily sensations retained from his time there through the physical processes of painting, erasing, and covering over.
In this exhibition, KINJO considers what continues to reside within an image after its visible form has been altered or effaced. The works hold these residual sensations as a kind of latent warmth—traces of something once present, still perceptible, and not yet entirely cooled.
