Koutaro Inoue: Oneiric Limbo

KOKI ARTS is pleased to present Oneiric Limbo, a solo exhibition by Koutaro Inoue. This marks Inoue’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery and will feature a selection of new paintings.

What Inoue depicts is the “presence of darkness” that lies hidden within scenes themselves. The darkness he once confronted in solitude possesses, at times, a quality of quiet companionship. The works in this exhibition evoke dreamlike moments in which the boundary between the everyday and the extraordinary begins to dissolve, while simultaneously seeking to reveal a certain “something” that stirs our inner emotions.

KOUTARO INOUE (b. 1982) graduated from Osaka College of Art in 2005, and began exhibiting in Tokyo in 2007. Recent exhibitions include solo exhibitions at two meet coffee room (Tokyo, 2025), KOKI ARTS (Tokyo 2021), and flotsam books (Tokyo, 2021); and group exhibitions at WHAT CAFE (Tokyo, 2024), Shinjuku Ophthalmologist Gallery (Tokyo, 2023), KOKI ARTS (Tokyo, 2022) and ISETAN Art Gallery (Tokyo, 2021). Inoue's work was selected for the Shell Art Award Exhibition (2017) and the Sompo Japan Art Award Exhibition FACE 2014 (2014).


Artist Statement

“I don’t want to wake up.” At times, the real world becomes unbearably heavy, and recently that weight has felt especially intense. When I look at the paintings I have made, the world within them is wrapped in a profound stillness, where only a faint ringing in the ears lingers like noise. It feels detached from my present reality, as though a different current of time flows there. Though I am the one who paints, I also stand before that world as a solitary viewer, quietly observing it. I sense that the figures within the paintings are aware of my presence as well; we are attuned to one another. In the morning, lying beneath the covers, I find myself thinking: “I don’t want to wake up.”

— Koutaro Inoue