The exhibition opens with Hamada's early "plywood paintings," a series he developed from the mid-1970s through the early 1980s and identifies as the point of origin of his practice. The works bear the influence of Yoshishige Saitō (1904–2001), who rejected painting as representational image and held instead that the process itself constituted the essence of the work — painting as matter inscribed with the traces of its own making. Each plywood painting is composed of multiple narrow black panels, each crossed by a single thin line of orange-red. Their austerity of composition and palette, carried later into his woodblock prints, aligns with the Minimalist and Conceptual currents of the years in which the works were made. Yet their source is intimate: the artist's memory, from a childhood in Kōchi, of dawn breaking over the Pacific horizon.

Kiyoshi Hamada, DRAWING(84), 1984, Paper, pencil, 96.5 x 44.1 in (245 x 112 cm)

Following his success in woodblock printmaking — a collaborative process that limited the artist's hands-on involvement — Hamada turned to a more elemental and labor-intensive act: working directly with his hands. Begun in the 1980s, the Drawing series is attentive to the physicality embedded in the act of drawing itself. Working in graphite on paper, he filled squares and rectangles with countless strokes until each surface hardened into a dense, lustrous black. What results is no longer an image but sheer matter — time made visible through accumulation. "Drawing, for me, lies in working the surface of the paper over with pencil, patiently, until a robust pictorial substance is built up," the artist has said. "It is an act of holding oneself under control while taking the measure of one's distance from oneself."

Kiyoshi Hamada, 28-10-21, 2016, Acrylic on plywood (triptych), 70.9 x 108.3 in (180 x 275 cm)

Through the 1990s and 2000s, Hamada continued to pursue abstraction through material and technique. Alongside his ongoing work in pencil, he turned to canvas and paint, building up layer after layer of color and then cutting back down into the surface with brushes, painting knives, and carving gouges. The method draws on tsuishu, the traditional lacquer technique in which coat upon coat of urushi is applied and then carved in relief. With this craft sensibility behind it, the work extends his inquiry into the physicality of making: each excavated line exposes the strata of time held within the surface. The three-panel 28-10-21 (2016) is among the finest works in the series. Red, black, and beige interlace across the surface, evoking at once a shimmering atmosphere and the hide of an animal.

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The exhibition closes with two large ink paintings, newly created for this occasion. Across a career of more than fifty years, Hamada has laid down stroke after stroke by his own hand, seeking the weight a work accrues through that labor and the sense of time held within it — while remaining in dialogue with his formative encounters with nature in childhood. "The repetition of action that characterizes Hamada's work resembles the motion of waves breaking endlessly on the shore," writes Mari Tsukamoto, Chief Curator at The Museum of Art, Kochi, who organized his 2025 retrospective. "Perhaps Hamada pursues a system as a framework for giving form to that landscape through his own body, and so gives himself over to the thoroughly repetitive act."

Kiyoshi Hamada (b. 1937, Kōchi Prefecture, Japan) graduated from Tama Art University in 1961 with a degree in oil painting. His work has been included in numerous museum exhibitions in Japan, among them Prints in Japan (Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, 1985), Expression of Line: Where Eye and Hand Lead (The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, 1991), and Printmaking in the 1970s (Shoto Museum of Art, Shibuya, 1996). In 2015 he was the subject of the solo exhibition The Trajectory of Kiyoshi Hamada: Layering, Carving, Painting. In 2025, Hamada was the subject of a major retrospective, Kiyoshi Hamada: Journey — 1975 and onward, at The Museum of Art, Kochi, in his native prefecture, surveying a half century of his practice. His works are held in major collections including the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Cleveland Museum of Art.