SEIZAN Gallery is pleased to present AWAI, a group exhibition featuring three distinguished artists working across different mediums: Marina Berio, Aya Fujioka, and Asa Hiramatsu. The exhibition will be on view from October 23 through December 20, 2025, with an opening reception with the artists on Thursday, October 23, from 6 to 8 PM. A gallery talk with the three artists, moderated by Pauline Vermare, the Philip and Edith Leonian Curator of Photography at the Brooklyn Museum, will be held on Saturday, October 25, from 2 to 4 PM.

Awai is a classical Japanese term signifying an in-between realm or liminal space where two entities meet, overlap, or interact. It evokes the subtle boundary between dualities—light and shadow, self and other, reality and dream. The exhibition reflects on how the three artists, each working through a distinct medium, embody and explore the delicate and polysemous notion of Awai.

Marina Berio, an interdisciplinary artist, presents a series of charcoal drawings created between 2007 and 2012. Each work is a meticulously rendered negative of a photograph taken while walking or driving through landscapes, or in artists’ studios. The inversion of light and shadow resists immediate or literal interpretation—a sunlit field becomes a black void, and studio lights suggest ominous celestial forms. The in-betweenness of these photographic negatives suggests the potential for image-making rather than assertions of iconographic truth. “Shadows become foreground, and highlights become absence. I consider the photographic negative a natural and poetic way to talk about loss, doubt, and ambivalence,” Berio notes.

Additionally, Berio presents three newly made works from her ongoing series of gum bichromate prints—a 19th-century photographic process that uses light-sensitive dichromates instead of silver halides. Using unconventional pigments such as her own blood, Berio transforms family photographs into intimate and visceral visual experiences, merging the physical body with memory and image.

Photographer Aya Fujioka presents selected works from LIFE STUDIES, a newly published series from AKAAKA in Kyoto, Japan, based on photographs she took in New York from the late 2000s to the 2010s. Heavily influenced by the street-photography style of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Fujioka captures fleeting moments of urban life—images that oscillate between the singular and the uncanny, the mysterious and the quietly tranquil.

Taken during her time in New York as an aspiring photographer, the series reflects a deeply personal journey. “They are reflections of my guts,” Fujioka remarks, revealing her inner struggles and conflicts at the time. Yet the photographs themselves bear little trace of the photographer’s personal identity; instead, they invite viewers to see them as moments that could be experienced by anyone in New York, regardless of gender, race, or identity. In doing so, Fujioka blurs the distinction between who stands behind and before the camera, the personal and the collective, the observer and the observed, the intimate and the anonymous, inviting viewers into a subtle and transitional narrative of urban life.

A self-taught painter Asa Hiramatsu presents six newly created canvases in her U.S. debut. Her paintings feature textured, muted surfaces of oil paint, applied primarily with a palette knife or directly by hand. Through this tactile process, she constructs tranquil images of simple objects and abstract forms that float against dreamlike fields of color. Hiramatsu’s works may evoke comparisons to European surrealists such as René Magritte, yet her imagery arises less from art-historical lineage than from visceral necessity. “These are images I’ve been holding inside my body since childhood,” she explains. “Painting is a vital act—an attempt to map my inner existence onto canvas, like exploring a role-playing video game.”

Recurring motifs such as clouds and seesaws populate her compositions. “I always wanted to be a cloud as a child—I believed they were my friends,” she recalls. To her, the cloud anchored to the ground carries a sense of reality, while the seesaw becomes a device for measuring its weight. In another work, Now, Hiramatsu draws inspiration from the Zen teaching of “the eternal now.” A black, biomorphic form oscillates between fullness and void, stillness and motion, presence and absence. Through painting, Hiramatsu inhabits the Awai where imagination and reality, sanity and madness, quietly converge.

Marina Berio (b. 1966, Boston, MA) was born to an Italian father and a Japanese American mother. She studied photography, drawing, sculpture, and art history before earning her MFA in Photography from Bard College. She has received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Pollock/Krasner Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has been an artist-in-residence at MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Millay Colony. Her work was recently featured in a major historical survey on materiality in photography at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and she has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Miranda (Paris), Galería Phuyu (Buenos Aires), Michael Steinberg Fine Art (New York), and the OFF Triennale (Hamburg).  Her recent project, Ten Photography Lessons for a Dead President, is an artist’s book exploring her family history and the incarceration of her relatives—along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans—during World War II.

Aya Fujioka (b. 1972, Hiroshima, Japan) studied photography at the College of Art, Nihon University. From 2007 to 2013, Fujioka lived in New York with support from the Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan. Her photobook of her hometown Hiroshima, Here Goes River (Akaaka, 2017) earned multiple major awards including the Kimura Ihei Award. Her work has been widely exhibited, including at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa and the Irie Taikichi Memorial Museum of Photography in Nara. Her publications include Comment te dire adieu (Ricochet) and I Don’t Sleep Public (Akaaka). Fujioka’s work is held in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She lives and works in Kyoto, Japan.

Asa Hiramatsu (b. 1982, Tokyo, Japan) studied Linguistics at University of the Sacred Heart, Tokyo before pursuing her lifelong passion for art. Her self-taught, multidisciplinary practice spans oil painting, collage, illustration, and kamishibai. Hiramatsu’s work has been exhibited at numerous venues including 104 GALERIE and LOKO Gallery in Tokyo. She has also contributed illustrations to various publications, notably for the Japanese translation of Jonathan Swift’s 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels, serialized weekly in The Asahi Shimbun, and later compiled into a volume titled TRAVELOGUE G: Illustrations for Gulliver’s Travels (SWITCH Publishing). In 2023 and 2024, Hiramatsu undertook an artist residency at photographer Saul Leiter’s studio in New York before contributing an essay to Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective (Thames & Hudson, USA).
 

For inquiry, contact info@seizan-gallery.com

​