ANEMOIA

Otherwise Gallery is pleased to present Anemoia, a solo exhibition by Mayumi Tsuzuki, marking her first presentation with the gallery in two years. Drawing from familiar landscapes and everyday objects, Tsuzuki has continually sought to capture the unspoken sensations and layered temporalities resting beneath their surfaces. Through meticulously constructed compositions bathed in serene light, ordinary scenes detach from the boundaries between reality and imagination, unfolding toward alternate narratives. Whether depicting populated scenes or hushed, deserted interiors, her canvases retain an evocative blank space—a quiet margin that prompts viewers to envision the moments preceding and following each depicted instant. Images gathered across cinema, vintage advertisements, and archival photographs merge with Tsuzuki’s own sensibilities, woven anew into altered sceneries. While her previous exhibition traced the shifting contours of personal memory, this new body of work expands her gaze toward times and spaces never directly experienced. When we feel nostalgia, how much of it truly belongs to our own lived past? Standing before her works, unfamiliar landscapes unexpectedly materialize as intimately known. We invite you to experience the exhibition in person and discover the elusive origins of this sentiment. _ Artist Statement Within the nostalgia we hold, memories of things that never existed often quietly slip in. The title of this exhibition, Anemoia, refers to an inexplicable longing for a time one has never lived or a place one has never visited. Images of foreign lands once glimpsed across printed matter or screens, where light and shadow intersect—these are idealized phantoms, visions to which we cannot help but be drawn, even while knowing they are fundamentally fictional. In this exhibition, alongside scenes born of this intangible yearning, I have depicted unfamiliar afterimages lurking just beside the familiar fabric of daily life: silent rooms that have fulfilled their purpose, prefabricated seasonal holidays, and nameless transit zones suspended between departures and arrivals. Like wandering into an impeccably constructed façade, it is a space at once absurd and melancholic, unsettling yet endearing—a dormant memory, perhaps, of something that never occurred, resting deep within someone's mind.