AIFA Gallery presents Surface and Silence, a duo exhibition of Japanese artists Marie Higashi (b. 1991, Nagasaki) and Kansai Noguchi (b. 1982, Fukuoka). Although their practices differ in medium, Higashi in painting and surface work, Noguchi in ceramics, their approaches converge in a shared reverence for material, fragility, and silence, deeply rooted in Japanese culture.

Marie Higashi began her professional life as a nurse, witnessing the fragile line between life and death. Out of personal crisis, she instinctively turned to painting in 2017. Her works reflect this experience: layered, scraped, and scarred surfaces that embody a cycle of destruction and regeneration. Higashi paints on wooden panels with acrylics, pigments, and organic materials such as charcoal and tea. Through scratching and erasure, she creates textures where absence and presence coexist. Her approach resonates with Japanese notions of impermanence (mono no aware) and the beauty of imperfection (wabi-sabi), where scars and voids are revealed as essential marks of resilience.

Kansai Noguchi, born in Fukuoka, initially pursued music before turning to ceramics. A formative stay in New York in 2013 shifted his path from performance to craft. On his return to Japan, he studied with sculptor Takuya Yoshida and ceramicist Ikuko Hiyoshi, later establishing his Tokyo studio in 2016. Deeply influenced by Jōmon and Mehrgarh pottery, Noguchi’s vessels and mixed-media works reflect simplicity and technical mastery. His aesthetic, modern classical, combines restrained forms and a limited palette with a musical sensibility: creating becomes a meditative act of emptying the mind, allowing rhythm and silence to emerge.

This sensibility connects to the Japanese concept of ma (間), the interval or space that gives form to silence and resonance.

Placed together, Higashi and Noguchi embody two complementary dimensions of Japanese aesthetics. Higashi inscribes fragility and renewal through surface, echoing kintsugi and the act of healing. Noguchi cultivates rhythm and silence through form, embodying shibui subtlety and timeless presence. Both practices invite viewers into a contemplative space where contradictions such as life and death, fragility and resilience, sound and silence, are held together rather than resolved.

AIFA’s Duo Show, Surface and Silence, affirms that beauty lies not in perfection but in transformation. Both Marie Higashi and Kansai Noguchi carry forward Japanese cultural values of impermanence, subtlety, and silence into the global present, creating works that are at once intimate, timeless, and profoundly contemporary.