What remains animal within us?

Ken Higaki’s paintings exist in the uneasy space between instinct and self-awareness, where the human figure begins to absorb the qualities of the animal world not as fantasy, but as revelation. Faces emerge from darkness furred, feathered, watchful, while bodies crawl across surfaces and dissolve into shadow, as though driven by forces older than language itself. Yet despite their predatory forms, many of these figures do not project dominance. They appear hesitant, wounded, suspended in moments of psychological exposure. One senses not monsters, but beings shaped by adaptation, by fear, by the long tension between survival and intimacy.

These new paintings turn inward, toward the psyche. Desire, loneliness, shame, tenderness, and hunger become ecological forces unto themselves, reshaping the body from within. Higaki’s hybrid figures evoke folklore and myth, recalling medieval bestiaries, Japanese yokai, or the dramatic chiaroscuro of Baroque painting, yet they remain distinctly contemporary in their emotional ambiguity. At the center of the exhibition is the idea of yearning, not simply as desire, but as a condition of being. A yearning for safety, for recognition, for closeness, for escape from one’s own nature. His subjects seem to hover at the edge of transformation, carrying within them both violence and vulnerability, instinct and sorrow.

Fur, feathers, claws, traces of the animal world linger throughout the exhibition not as ornament, but as something worn close to the body. Something feared becomes warmth. Something killed becomes shelter from the cold. Higaki’s figures linger within this uneasy terrain where violence and intimacy remain tangled together, where survival softens into tenderness without ever fully losing its teeth.

Something restless moves beneath the surface of these paintings. Figures emerge from darkness only partially, as though the body itself were still becoming.

In Higaki’s world, the animal is not separate from the self. It is the part of us that remains alert in darkness, that hungers, retreats, protects, lashes out, and longs to be held all at once.