Shiseido Gallery in Ginza, Tokyo, is holding two special exhibitions as part of its 100th anniversary project, "Going Beyond and Participating in Beauty: Shinzo Fukuhara's Aesthetics Shinzo Fukuhara / ASSEMBLE, THE EUGENE Studio," with the first from October 19th to December 26th and the second from January 16th to March 17th, 2019.

Shinzo Fukuhara, "Tower," 1938
2019 marks the 100th anniversary of the Shiseido Gallery, said to be the oldest surviving art gallery in Japan. Shinzo Fukuhara, Shiseido's first president and founder of the Shiseido Gallery, is known not only for laying the foundations for Shiseido's cosmetics manufacturing and design, but also for his pioneering work as a photographic artist in modern Japan. Looking back at Fukuhara's work now, we see him as a truly contemporary artist who actively engaged in social creation, going beyond the realms of Shiseido's corporate management and his work as a photographer. The title of this exhibition, "Beyond Conflict: Participating in Beauty," is a phrase Fukuhara actually spoke, expressing his determination to create beauty beyond certain boundaries. These boundaries encompass, for example, the boundaries between artistic genres such as painting and photography, or photography and haiku, as well as the differences between crafts and industrial products, and transcend established values and conventional ways of looking at things. Fukuhara's commitment to creating beauty beyond these boundaries reveals a previously unknown image of him, one who straddles the boundaries between art and economics, connecting various creative activities within society and ultimately transforming society into a better, more beautiful place.

To further these activities, Fukuhara also emphasized the role of open spaces such as Ginza galleries and parlors, where people could meet and converse freely, share new values, and inspire one another. His network of artistic activities, centered on photography, was also connected to these spaces, and through these connections he captured various new values existing in society and disseminated them back into society. He also incorporated these ideas within Shiseido and distributed them throughout Japan through Shiseido's owned media, Shiseido Monthly Report (the predecessor to Hanatsubaki). This socially creative activity, which could be described as a circulation of value, was supported by Fukuhara's unique aesthetic.

ASSEMBLE "Granby Winter Garden Collage" Image: Assemble, Granby Workshop / Assemble
This project invites ASSEMBLE and THE EUGENE Studio, two studios that have inherited Fukuhara's essential aspects in the modern era and present new forms of socially creative activity and art in different ways, to collaborate across 100 years, exploring a creative and dynamic partnership between Fukuhara and them.

ASSEMBLE is a British architectural group that won the Turner Prize, a prestigious British award for contemporary art, in 2015. The Eugene Studio is a Japanese artist studio that has been attracting considerable attention both at home and abroad in recent years. Their representative work, "White Painting," attempts to update the larger history of art while capturing the collective consciousness of people in today's global environment.

For the first exhibition, The Eugene Studio created the setting, while Assemble created the entire space. For the second exhibition, which will begin in early 2019, Assemble will open their Granby Four Streets workshop in Liverpool, the subject of their Turner Prize award, in Ginza, Tokyo, challenging themselves to create beauty that transcends location.

THE EUGENE Studio "White Painting (Los Angeles)"
Shinzo Fukuhara, Assemble, and The EUGENE Studio share a common goal: to create a society that circulates value and generates synergies by participating in a variety of creative endeavors that transcend established boundaries, each with their own aesthetic. Marking the 100th anniversary of the Shiseido Gallery's opening, this exhibition, which can be considered a collaborative project by the three parties, is a challenging exhibition that transcends time and space, unlike any other archive exhibition. It truly shares with the present day the creative activities and will that Fukuhara practiced a century ago.

Furthermore, in order to closely examine Fukuhara's aesthetics, the project used morphological analysis using AI and automatic language processing to interpret the thoughts that guided his work from over 200 texts he left behind that touch on art and beauty, totaling approximately 1.45 million characters. This unique curation based on a new approach is also one of the distinctive features of this exhibition. The unique perspectives and attempts presented in this project will provide a valuable opportunity to discover the beauty and creative possibilities of a new society.