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Portrait
Standing Pine Tokyo
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Emily Andersen, Tobias Kappel, Yoshihiro Sakurai, Thomas Gillant, Lucas Foletto Celinski, Noritoshi Hirakawa
STANDING PINE Tokyo is pleased to announce “PORTRAIT”, a group exhibition opening on Saturday, July 5. The exhibition brings together six artists: Emily Andersen (UK), Tobias Kappel (Germany), Yoshihiro Sakurai (Japan), Thomas Gillant (France), Lucas Foletto Celinski (Brazil), and Noritoshi Hirakawa (Japan).
While diverging from the traditional notions of portraiture evoked by the term itself, this exhibition seeks to reengage with its essential concerns. The participating artists’ works encompass layered themes: image, documentation, embodiment, sexuality, and time, each offering new perspectives on the relationship between subject and artwork.
Emily Andersen creates photographic works that quietly capture the remains of abandoned industrial facilities and the interiors of urban architecture, revealing poetic stillness and traces of memory embedded within the everyday. Since the 1980s, she has also continued to pursue portrait photography, depicting a wide range of celebrated figures, including Nan Goldin, featured in this exhibition, as well as notable writers, poets, filmmakers, actors, and architects. Her work consistently reflects a refined aesthetic sensitivity to atmosphere and poetic expression. Moreover, through the medium of photography, she has engaged in a sustained inquiry into the language of portraiture, the concept of time, and the representation of memory, while diligently examining the process by which the everyday is transformed into a still image.
In an era when photography is no longer confined to mirroring reality, Tobias Kappel explores new possibilities in image-making. His works navigate the in-between space of analogue and digital processes, transcending genre boundaries while questioning the authenticity and finality of visual expression. “impssbl’s nthng (2019)”, part of his ‘brother’ series, was created using the functions of an all-in-one printer. Embracing the noise and errors that emerge during processes of scanning and duplication, the work critically and playfully investigates how machines ‘see’ and ‘interpret’ visual information.
Yoshihiro Sakurai’s “Untitled (#5)” and “Untitled (#7)” (both 2025) are based on backstage scenes he photographed during a Paris fashion show in 2002. Capturing the tension and exhilaration that pervade the world of haute couture, along with the subtle expressions of the models, these photographs offer a perspective that surpasses mere documentation. Now, after 23 years, they emerge as a quiet narrative where memory and time intersect. In his latest works, Sakurai delineates the contours of human existence through the themes of “anonymity,” “collectivity,” and a “sense of absence.” While the artist remains unseen, the figures who immerse themselves in its lingering presence quietly emerge as portraits engraved in memory and emotion. The crowd that appears through the mist, though composed of isolated individuals, collectively forms a singular emotional mass. In this space, the boundaries of the individual dissolve, and only a shared ‘presence’ or ‘sensitivity’ quietly emerges.
Installed in dialogue with the exhibition space, Thomas Gillant’s sculptural works draw attention to their negative spaces. These installations resonate with the visual interplay found in his drawing practice, an exploration of perceptual tension between surface and depth, where illusions of spatiality emerge and dissolve. By approaching space as an autonomous identity in itself, Gillant’s installations generate a spatial presence that seems to render a portrait not of a person, but of space itself.
Lucas Foletto Celinski’s work explores the body as a site of both constraint and liberation, focusing on queer sexuality and the nuances of pleasure, as well as the intense physical sensations of embodied experience. His practice employs tactile, craft-based methods such as jewellery making, textile work, analogue photography, and hand printing, using material processes to evoke sensorial engagement with the body. His photo-montage series ‘La Petite Mort’ presents a more intimate scale, offering a poetic reflection on fundamental themes such as pleasure, love, and death. The series delicately captures fleeting, transcendent moments at the edge of sensation, using techniques including analogue photomontage, multiple exposure, silkscreen, and photo transfer to other media. These works juxtapose images of lovers and friends engaged in BDSM with classical sculptural representations of the nude, erotic body, establishing a dialogue between private, intimate encounters and public portrayals of sensuality.
Noritoshi Hirakawa’s photographic series ‘The anima’s talent’ begins with the Jungian psychological concept of the “anima.” Rather than interpreting the anima as a mere archetype of femininity within the male psyche, Hirakawa redefines it as a latent form of masculinity residing within the female subject. In this series, women perform this internal male image—the anima—as a role, revealing a paradoxical process in which they embody not femininity itself, but the “femininity-as-other” through the lens of internalised masculinity. Drawing on gendered performance traditions such as Kabuki and the Takarazuka Revue, Hirakawa approaches the structures of pleasure and identity that arise from this layered performance. The act of enacting the anima becomes a form of visual oscillation between femininity and masculinity, questioning fixed notions of gender and representation. In this presentation, Japanese model Akina Minami performs the role of the anima, rendering visible the fluid interplay between masculine and feminine in photographic form.
Throughout the exhibition, the ‘differences’ that emerge in dialogue with these works become entangled with the viewer’s personal memories and experiences, quietly prompting a reconsideration of what portraiture, as a form of expression, can be.
While diverging from the traditional notions of portraiture evoked by the term itself, this exhibition seeks to reengage with its essential concerns. The participating artists’ works encompass layered themes: image, documentation, embodiment, sexuality, and time, each offering new perspectives on the relationship between subject and artwork.
Emily Andersen creates photographic works that quietly capture the remains of abandoned industrial facilities and the interiors of urban architecture, revealing poetic stillness and traces of memory embedded within the everyday. Since the 1980s, she has also continued to pursue portrait photography, depicting a wide range of celebrated figures, including Nan Goldin, featured in this exhibition, as well as notable writers, poets, filmmakers, actors, and architects. Her work consistently reflects a refined aesthetic sensitivity to atmosphere and poetic expression. Moreover, through the medium of photography, she has engaged in a sustained inquiry into the language of portraiture, the concept of time, and the representation of memory, while diligently examining the process by which the everyday is transformed into a still image.
In an era when photography is no longer confined to mirroring reality, Tobias Kappel explores new possibilities in image-making. His works navigate the in-between space of analogue and digital processes, transcending genre boundaries while questioning the authenticity and finality of visual expression. “impssbl’s nthng (2019)”, part of his ‘brother’ series, was created using the functions of an all-in-one printer. Embracing the noise and errors that emerge during processes of scanning and duplication, the work critically and playfully investigates how machines ‘see’ and ‘interpret’ visual information.
Yoshihiro Sakurai’s “Untitled (#5)” and “Untitled (#7)” (both 2025) are based on backstage scenes he photographed during a Paris fashion show in 2002. Capturing the tension and exhilaration that pervade the world of haute couture, along with the subtle expressions of the models, these photographs offer a perspective that surpasses mere documentation. Now, after 23 years, they emerge as a quiet narrative where memory and time intersect. In his latest works, Sakurai delineates the contours of human existence through the themes of “anonymity,” “collectivity,” and a “sense of absence.” While the artist remains unseen, the figures who immerse themselves in its lingering presence quietly emerge as portraits engraved in memory and emotion. The crowd that appears through the mist, though composed of isolated individuals, collectively forms a singular emotional mass. In this space, the boundaries of the individual dissolve, and only a shared ‘presence’ or ‘sensitivity’ quietly emerges.
Installed in dialogue with the exhibition space, Thomas Gillant’s sculptural works draw attention to their negative spaces. These installations resonate with the visual interplay found in his drawing practice, an exploration of perceptual tension between surface and depth, where illusions of spatiality emerge and dissolve. By approaching space as an autonomous identity in itself, Gillant’s installations generate a spatial presence that seems to render a portrait not of a person, but of space itself.
Lucas Foletto Celinski’s work explores the body as a site of both constraint and liberation, focusing on queer sexuality and the nuances of pleasure, as well as the intense physical sensations of embodied experience. His practice employs tactile, craft-based methods such as jewellery making, textile work, analogue photography, and hand printing, using material processes to evoke sensorial engagement with the body. His photo-montage series ‘La Petite Mort’ presents a more intimate scale, offering a poetic reflection on fundamental themes such as pleasure, love, and death. The series delicately captures fleeting, transcendent moments at the edge of sensation, using techniques including analogue photomontage, multiple exposure, silkscreen, and photo transfer to other media. These works juxtapose images of lovers and friends engaged in BDSM with classical sculptural representations of the nude, erotic body, establishing a dialogue between private, intimate encounters and public portrayals of sensuality.
Noritoshi Hirakawa’s photographic series ‘The anima’s talent’ begins with the Jungian psychological concept of the “anima.” Rather than interpreting the anima as a mere archetype of femininity within the male psyche, Hirakawa redefines it as a latent form of masculinity residing within the female subject. In this series, women perform this internal male image—the anima—as a role, revealing a paradoxical process in which they embody not femininity itself, but the “femininity-as-other” through the lens of internalised masculinity. Drawing on gendered performance traditions such as Kabuki and the Takarazuka Revue, Hirakawa approaches the structures of pleasure and identity that arise from this layered performance. The act of enacting the anima becomes a form of visual oscillation between femininity and masculinity, questioning fixed notions of gender and representation. In this presentation, Japanese model Akina Minami performs the role of the anima, rendering visible the fluid interplay between masculine and feminine in photographic form.
Throughout the exhibition, the ‘differences’ that emerge in dialogue with these works become entangled with the viewer’s personal memories and experiences, quietly prompting a reconsideration of what portraiture, as a form of expression, can be.
Schedule | Jul 5 (Sat) 2025-Jul 26 (Sat) 2025 Opening Hours Information
Opening Reception Jul 5 (Sat) 2025 17:00 - 19:00 | ||||
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| Fee | Free | ||||
| Website | https://standingpine.jp/en/exhibitions/204 | ||||
| Venue | Standing Pine Tokyo https://standingpine.jp/ | ||||
| Location | 3F Terrada Art Complex Ⅰ, 1-33-10 Higashi-Shinagawa, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo 140-0002 | ||||
| Access | 9 minute walk from exit B at Tennozu Isle Station on the Rinkai line, 10 minute walk from the South exit of Tennozu Isle Station on the Tokyo Monorail line, 9 minute walk from the North exit of Shimbamba Station on the Keikyu line. | ||||
| Related images | Click on the image to enlarge it |
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