Motif by Keiko Moriuchi, The Final Gutai Member

Art Again presents Motif by Keiko Moriuchi, the first Singapore exhibition by one of the last living Japanese Gutai artists, opening 17 January 2026 ahead of Singapore Art Week. Moriuchi was the final member inducted into the legendary Gutai Art Association and the only artist personally recruited by founder Jirō Yoshihara (1905–1972). At 83, she continues her radical experimentation with gold leaf, sacred geometries, and cosmic symbolism, bringing decades of artistic investigation to Singapore audiences for the first time.

The exhibition marks Art Again’s first ever presentation held during Singapore Art Week. The show features fourteen new works of Moriuchi’s and is hosted in TOKONOMA, a cultural project space in Tai Seng that showcases distinctive creative voices. The presentation offers an intimate encounter with Moriuchi’s distinctive visual language; richly layered canvases that are tactile and almost sculptural, built with her signature applications of gold leaf.

Born in Osaka in 1943, she spent one transformative year in New York in 1965, where she developed relationships with Ad Reinhardt, Isamu Noguchi, and other leading figures of the avant-garde. She joined Gutai in 1968 and remained an active member until the group’s dissolution in 1972.

Moriuchi’s art is rooted in a lifelong fascination with the universe. It is an exploration of cosmic order, energy, and the continuity of consciousness beyond the physical self. Her six-decade practice unites postwar experimental sensibility with profound spiritual awareness, guided by principles she associates with the cosmos: expansion, connection, and truth.

Now 83, Moriuchi rejects conventional markers of age: “I don’t want to say, ‘I’m eighty-three because that’s the number from my birth date.’ For me, right now, this moment is being born. Every day is a birth.” This philosophy of perpetual renewal permeates her work, which she views not as individual objects but as manifestations of the singular pursuit of understanding the universe. When asked about the exhibition title, Moriuchi explains, “The word ‘motif’ is incredibly profound, Humans can’t conjure that imagination without contemplating the universe. That imagination randomly surfaces in artists, scientists, religious scholars. Ideas like ‘the universe must be like this.’ That’s the etymology of the word ‘motif.'”

Motif brings together several bodies of work that reflect this cosmic meditation. A significant portion of the exhibition features works from Lu: The Never-Ending Thread series, where horizontal lines extend across canvases like threads stretching infinitely into the cosmos, reaching toward prime-number coordinates—representing the pure building blocks of the universe. Other works draw from ancient mythology and Eastern philosophy: Donut Peach fuses the Eastern symbol of immortality with the Poincaré Conjecture in mathematics, while Dragons in Eternal Circle depicts three dragons biting each other’s tails – an ancient Chinese symbol of heaven, earth, and humanity bound in eternal motion.