Rina Yoshizawa “Pollen”

7/12 (Sat)-8/9 (Sat), 2025
Opening hours: 12:00-19:00 (Wed-Sat)
Closed on Sun, Mon, Tue and National Holidays
Reception: Saturday, July 12, 18:00-19:00


The works evoke a sense of incompleteness—something hazy and dreamlike, as if the viewer is being guided toward a landscape glimpsed long ago, perhaps seen in a dream or buried within a faint memory. Yoshizawa turns her quiet gaze toward subtle shifts in everyday scenery—scenes so ordinary that they would fade away unless one intentionally stops to look or listen. She captures transient and unremarkable moments: the sight of a fountain rising, rain gradually peeling paint from a balcony, the garden of a childhood home that no longer exists, the shape of a trimmed hedge in someone’s yard, or the instant when an image suddenly resembles something entirely different. The exhibition title Pollen refers to the way bees gather pollen into small pellets as they move from flower to flower—an image the artist relates to her own practice of collecting fragments of scenes throughout her daily life.

Yoshizawa’s process involves drawing figures with charcoal or oil paint, then washing the surface with a spray bottle filled with water. She paints over the marks left behind, erasing and layering repeatedly. The images that dissolve into the water become something different from the original forms, yet faint traces remain. The disappearance of an image does not imply its absence—rather, the remaining traces allow each viewer’s imagination to expand beyond what is depicted. Through this repeated process, Yoshizawa attempts to grasp something that is both present and slipping away—like trying to hold sand that inevitably slips between one’s fingers.

The origin of her act of “erasing and drawing” can be traced back to her memories of snow. Born and raised in Niigata, a region known for heavy snowfall, Yoshizawa recalls lying in the vast snow-covered rice fields as a child, feeling as if she were becoming one with the earth as falling snow slowly covered her body. This experience continues to influence her work. She sees human life as an accumulation of subtle daily changes, much like estimating the age of a geological layer by examining the pollen embedded within it. In this way, she attempts to hold on to the fact that something once existed. By gently illuminating fleeting moments, she may be seeking to understand what it truly means for something—or someone—to “exist.”

In her works, often brought to completion just one step before they appear finished, “the images seem to continue moving within the painting,” as the artist herself notes. Time appears to continue flowing inside them. Encountering Yoshizawa’s paintings invites the viewer into a heightened sensitivity, an awareness sharpened by the delicacy of her visual language.


Rina Yoshizawa
Born in 1998 in Niigata. Lives and works in Tokyo.
Graduated from the Department of Oil Painting, Faculty of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts, in 2023.

Selected Exhibitions:
Solo Exhibition “Citron Sorbet” (2023, Tokyo University of the Arts, Tokyo), Group Exhibition “One Big Leaf” (2024, Space Aya, Tokyo), BankART AIR 2022 SPRING (2022, BankART Station, Kanagawa)