{"id":352675,"date":"2026-03-22T18:43:10","date_gmt":"2026-03-22T18:43:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/352675\/"},"modified":"2026-03-22T18:43:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-22T18:43:10","slug":"alia-sugawara-unveils-solo-exhibition-in-hong-kong-with-jun-takahashi-as-collaborator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/352675\/","title":{"rendered":"Alia Sugawara Unveils Solo Exhibition in Hong Kong With Jun Takahashi As Collaborator"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tHONG KONG<\/a> \u2014 The elusive fashion designer\u00a0Jun Takahashi\u2019s name made a surprise appearance on the Hong Kong art scene as a collaborator in Japan-based ink artist\u00a0Alia Sugawara\u2019s solo exhibition \u201cKonketsu\u201d in Tai Hang, a residential area southeast of the bustling shopping district Causeway Bay.<\/p>\n

\n\tRunning from Saturday to May 10, the showcase at Otherthings by The Shophouse features a series of paper-based artworks co-created with\u00a0Undercover<\/a>\u2019s Takahashi, art director\u00a0Tetsuya Nagato and ceramist\u00a0Kenta Anzai.<\/p>\n

\n\tSugawara said her first solo show outside Japan explores themes of duality, transformation and hybridity through hanging scrolls, folding screens and mounted pieces painted with ink ground from locally sourced flaxseed oil soot black inkstick.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe last time I was here, the gallery\u2019s owner [Alex Chan] took me to a local stationery store. I found an ink and some brushes that I really liked,\u201d she said. \u201cI used them because I wanted to use Hong Kong<\/a> materials for this collection.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cKonketsu,\u201d which means \u201cmixed blood\u201d in Japanese, refers both to her genealogy and to her fascination with nature\u2019s in\u2011between states, depicted through the bat-butterfly hybrids that take center stage in her work.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Artwork<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tArtwork by Alia Sugawara.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy<\/p>\n

\n\tBorn in\u00a0Sapporo\u00a0to a Japanese and American background and raised between cultures, Sugawara attended an art-focused high school, studying charcoal drawing, but went on to pursue environmental science and mathematical science at the\u00a0University of British Columbia\u00a0and\u00a0Waseda University.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe said the hybrid iconography was inspired by natural encounters in Hayama, a coastal town an hour south of Tokyo, where she resides.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAll the themes that I\u2019ve painted so far are things that I\u2019ve had some sort of interaction with in real life,\u201d she explained during a walk-through ahead of\u00a0Art Basel<\/a> Hong Kong\u00a0kicking off next Tuesday.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAnd just as I\u2019m staring at them, my imagination kind of gets to work, and I start to see it transform in some way, and then that\u2019s what I paint. They exist in my mind, and I\u2019m just spilling it onto paper,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

\n\tEarlier in her practice she favored crisp, controlled lines and clearly defined forms. With \u201cKonketsu,\u201d she set herself the challenge of loosening up and, to get the exact shapes and strokes she wanted for this body of work, Sugawara estimated she painted more than 1,000 butterflies in preparation.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI wasn\u2019t classically trained in Chinese calligraphy, but I really loved the ink just as a medium. The more unintentional it looks, the more skill it requires. I really wanted to push myself to reach that level of freedom,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Artwork<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tArtwork by Alia Sugawara in collaboration with Jun Takahashi and \u00a0Tetsuya Nagato.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy<\/p>\n

\n\tA hero piece from \u201cKonketsu\u201d is a revitalized Japanese antique folding screen with a black lacquer frame. Sugawara remounted the front with her painting on vintage silk, while Takahashi decorated the back with patchworks of stars and drew\u00a0Pinkman, an alien-like character that most recently appeared in Undercover<\/a>\u2019s spring 2025 men\u2019s collection.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn another large-scale collaborative piece, she painted Takahashi\u2019s other well-known figure,\u00a0Grace, first introduced in Undercover\u2019s spring 2009 collection, together with her bat-butterfly hybrids over a paper collage by Nagato using vintage music box punch sheets.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI think our styles all flow smoothly together,\u201d she said. \u201cSo this is a really enjoyable process.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"HONG KONG \u2014 The elusive fashion designer\u00a0Jun Takahashi\u2019s name made a surprise appearance on the Hong Kong art…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":352676,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1804,146,3448,85,46,148492],"class_list":{"0":"post-352675","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-art-basel","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-hong-kong","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-undercover"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=352675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352675\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/352676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}