This exhibition begins with a question: in an age where information and images are violently saturated, can we truly say that we are seeing what is in front of us? As scenes of tragedy and humor appear side by side on the same screen, and events are instantly shared, consumed, and forgotten, from where can sensation and ethics possibly arise? This urgency takes different forms within the practices of the four artists gathered here. Through the pastiche of works by Ana Mendieta, R E M A exposes how ethics can easily waver and be transformed by environment and circumstance. Airi Kawakami, drawing from her own experience of surgery, moves back and forth between “hospital” and “hospitality,” translating bodily memory and gaze into painting. Meanwhile, the chairs by Yuki Hiragi and the generative interventions of plants by SYO TANii bring breath and circulation into the exhibition space, giving rise to new cycles in the relationship between artworks and viewers. Mediated through different materials and bodies, the expressions of these four artists intersect within the space and gradually emerge as a single dialogue. This exhibition is an attempt to return the ethics and sensations that lie between seeing and feeling to our own bodies.

A sleeping face, and a world being torn apart. The exhibition title, Sleeping Face, Splitting World, Stick Needles Into the Eyes, appears as a poem that encompasses seeing—or awakening—and the will to recover an ethics that has been shattered. As we spoke about the theme of the exhibition, a question arose within us in this contemporary moment of violent saturation of information and images: can we really say that we are “seeing” what is visible before our eyes? At dawn, unable to sleep, I was absentmindedly scrolling through short videos when one image suddenly caught my attention. In the pale gray rubble faintly lit by the morning sun stood a boy who looked about ten years old, holding a large mass of vivid red and white flesh in his arms. The translated caption stated that the boy was holding his mother. Instinctively, I looked at my own mother sleeping beside me, and for reasons I could not explain, tears began to flow uncontrollably. In that moment, I felt—clearly enough to say for the first time—that I had truly seen that fact. A sleeping face, and a world being torn apart. The everyday life that exists here and now, and an unbearable reality. Confronted with this pressing truth, how long can we continue to keep our eyes open? The image at the opening of Ryu Murakami’s novel Piercing—a man possessed by the obsessive fear that he might stab his sleeping baby with an ice pick, standing drenched in cold sweat while gripping a sharp needle—symbolizes an ethics that resides in the choice not to pierce. The moment to stick a needle into the eye is now.