SEIZAN Gallery is pleased to present To Be Cloud, the first solo exhibition by Tokyo-based painter Asa Hiramatsu. On view from May 14 through July 2, 2026, the exhibition gathers eighteen new paintings that distill the artist's investigation into the inner landscape she carries within herself — and that, she believes, each of us carries as well.

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A self-taught painter and illustrator, Hiramatsu makes tranquil, contemplative scenes built up in muted color and the heavy, layered surface of oil paint. She calls them inner landscapes: a world she holds within herself, running parallel to the one we share. For Hiramatsu, painting is a way of descending into her own inner topography and registering what she finds there — meeting familiar faces, finding new patches of ground, driving a stake to mark that she has been. It is, in her words, an act of "understanding why I am myself." That journey, by its nature, opens into the viewer's own — into the self, and into its relationships with others, with society, with the natural world.

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Two recurring icons anchor this body of work: the cloud and the seesaw. The cloud was a friend to the young Hiramatsu — she longed to join the clouds, to become one of them; it was, for her, a presence on which she placed absolute value. In her paintings, clouds are often shown close to the ground rather than high in the sky, nearer to where human life unfolds. They are her emblem of impermanence: always present, and yet always shifting, never holding the same shape twice. In Japanese Buddhism, wandering monks have long been called unsui (雲水), "cloud-water," after the phrase kōun ryūsui (行雲流水) — drifting like clouds, flowing like water. The name describes a way of being without fixed abode and without attachment, moving where one is needed. Hiramatsu's clouds belong to that lineage: figures of a self that need not hold a fixed shape in order to be real, and that can move freely between the reality we share and the reality each of us carries within. The largest canvas in the exhibition, Sign of Clouds – 01, takes that movement as its premise: white cloud merges into patches of dark color, the boundary between the two refusing to settle, reaching toward what Hiramatsu calls kaos — the originary state before yin and yang separate, where boundary, comparison, and conflict have not yet emerged, and where the distinction between the real and the unreal has not yet been drawn.

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If the cloud is her figure of impermanence, the seesaw is her figure of balance — and of balance's perpetual loss and recovery. While working, Hiramatsu often noticed how easy it is to settle too deeply into one side or the other: so absorbed in the inner world that the outer one falls away, or so anchored in the outer that the inner becomes unreachable. Both realities, she insists, are absolutely necessary — the world we share with one another, and the world each of us carries within. The seesaw emerged from that constant going-and-returning. A seesaw is never still: it does not touch the ground, the wind moves it, weight tilts it, and it rights itself again. Mapping herself onto it, Hiramatsu travels between inside and outside, and lets each painting fix one moment of that motion.

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Position Between Us – 01 marks a recent turn, developed in the months after Hiramatsu's first United States presentation — the group exhibition Awai at SEIZAN Gallery in 2025. The painting depicts a table-soccer game, whose plastic figures are fixed to long rotating bars and moved only by hands at the table's edge. After more than a decade of descending into her own inner landscape, Hiramatsu had begun to ask whether she was "really an individual, separate from everything." We are born of someone; we carry ties we did not choose; even alone, we are constituted by our relationships. The table-soccer figures hold that doubt in a single image — fixed, layered, moved by hands not their own. The outward turn this painting makes does not break with her practice; it deepens it: the relationships that bind us are themselves an inner terrain worth descending into.

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Art, for Hiramatsu, is finally a way of blessing existence — her own, and the viewer’s. To Be Cloud is offered in that spirit: an invitation to each visitor to recognize the inner landscape they already carry, and to treat it as a place worth returning to.

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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 (paper theater). Her work has been exhibited at SEIZAN Gallery, New York; 104 GALERIE and LOKO Gallery, Tokyo. She has contributed illustrations to a range of publications, most notably the Japanese translation of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), serialized weekly in The Asahi Shimbun and later collected as TRAVELOGUE G: Illustrations for Gulliver’s Travels (SWITCH Publishing). In 2023 and 2024, Hiramatsu held an artist residency at photographer Saul Leiter’s New York studio, and contributed an essay to Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective (Thames & Hudson).