Hiroko Ichihara Solo Exhibition "Happiness, Right There"

SAI presents a solo exhibition 'Happiness, Right There' by contemporary artist Hiroko Ichihara, from 12 February to 1 March 2026. Ichihara is known for her practice of using language as a medium, playfully drawing out the emotions and humour embedded in everyday life. 

Ichihara has been presenting works that focus on the “word” itself by taking everyday words out of their context and exhibiting them as “images”in space. What appears in her works are not poetic or abstract words, but short Japanese phrases rooted in everyday sensations. When these phrases line the walls, the scene takes on a lightness evoking a social media timeline spilling into physical space.

The concise phrases, carefully balanced typography and spatial placement, and the uniform texture of silkscreen printing, with its sense of printing and reproduction, naturally imbue the visual language of advertising. Words that contain the ambiguity, atmosphere, and indirectness characteristic of the Japanese language are reduced to easily digestible forms and flow through the SAI space like social media posts.
The flood of words that appear and disappear in myriad forms, drifting contemporary emotions at the mercy of overflowing information.

Repeating the lightness of text and tone, and allowing words detached from context to rise as a form of visual pleasure, this style resonates with the methods of Lawrence Weiner, a leading figure in conceptual art who has long treated language as a primary medium. 
At the same time, Ichihara’s distinctive sensibility transforms the signs and symbols circulating in everyday life directly into artworks, expanding her practice onto a broader cultural landscape. Filled with Ichihara’s works, the SAI space evokes the sensation of scrolling through X, recalling the urban scenery of Shibuya saturated with advertisements and information. In an era when anyone can send out words to the public, language has shifted from something meant to communicate to something to be consumed. Still, emotion infused in words still plays with us, projecting the inner landscape in the dry urban space.

This exhibition presents approximately 50 works selected from Ichihara’s ongoing series of silkscreened canvases, produced continuously since the 1990s, along with the installation of her well-known Love Fortune (Koi-mikuji). We invite you to SAI to experience an encounter with the sensation of saving your favourites as they flow through your feed in a space where words are arranged like a painting and drift by.

In cooperation with: Kamakura gallery