Mural Art Project – On Takashi Kuribayashi’s The Path to the Reversal Site (2025– ) | Taro Amano (Chief Curator, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery)

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The work by Takashi Kuribayashi is situated within Artist Cafe Fukuoka, a facility dedicated to fostering the growth and exchange of emerging artists. The space occupies part of the former Maizuru Junior High School in Fukuoka’s Chūō Ward. Kuribayashi’s participation in this context was prompted by his presentation of GENKI-RO and the Tanker Project, created together with the artist collective CINEMA CARAVAN, as a special program for FaN Week 2023—an event held across the city as part of Fukuoka Art Next (FaN), an initiative by Fukuoka City to promote urban development through the arts.

For this project, Kuribayashi produced a site-specific work: a mural executed on the wall of a former classroom. The room now functions as a community space, accompanied by a café, designed to encourage diverse forms of interaction that transcend disciplinary boundaries.

Kuribayashi originally studied Nihonga (Japanese-style painting) at Musashino Art University before continuing his education at Kassel University and the Düsseldorf Art Academy in Germany. Since 2013, he has also maintained a base in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Over time, he has become known less for painting and more for his sculptural and architectural installations. In this sense, the current mural marks a rare return to the two-dimensional format.

Encountering the work in person, one notices on the left side of the composition a foreground of grasses and foliage, with a series of mountains receding behind them. At the center, an expanse of white—ambiguous between horizon and ground—opens into a quiet interval, punctuated by a few solitary trees. Within this zone, the familiar silhouette of GENKI-RO appears, alongside the darkened form of the ongoing Tanker Project. The sky is rendered not as a clear blue but as a heavy, overcast mass of clouds. Slightly right of center, mirrors are affixed in a radial pattern, leaving the middle open, introducing a shifting interplay between the painted surface and the viewer’s own reflected presence.

The work Kuribayashi has created on this occasion is, in general terms, a mural. Its format and underlying intent differ fundamentally from those of a framed painting. The history of the frame itself can be traced to antiquity: the decorative borders placed between wall and floor in the mosaic murals of ancient Greece and Rome are often cited as precursors to what later became the picture frame. Yet the frames we refer to here—those intended for movable, self-contained paintings—emerged in the Renaissance of the fifteenth century. Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks (1483–1486), painted for the chapel of San Francesco Grande in Milan, is regarded as an early example in which the artist was instructed to produce a work specifically to fit a pre-constructed frame. In this sense, once a painting became an object to be housed within a frame, it gained mobility, allowing it to be displayed in multiple places. It simultaneously entered the realm of circulation—ultimately, the art market.

A mural, by contrast, is firmly site-bound. The cave paintings of Altamira and Lascaux survived precisely because they remained in situ until their eventual discovery. These were not works created for aesthetic contemplation in the modern sense but functioned within religious or ritual contexts—forms of communication that predate written language. Until the eighteenth century, artworks—including sacred images—were produced primarily on commission. Patrons were the powerful: monarchs, aristocrats, and religious institutions. With the rise of democratic nations in the nineteenth century, the responsibility of sustaining the arts shifted to the general citizenry, and artworks produced from the artist’s own initiative increasingly became objects of purchase. Within this trajectory, the mural—immovable by nature—fell outside the logic of the art market.

Against such conditions, it is notable that many of the avant-garde artists working in Europe from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries shared a skepticism toward the framed painting. To them, the framed picture had become an emblem of commercialism, serving as a domestic ornament for the bourgeois home. In contrast, they advocated for artistic practices that aspired toward public, monumental expression—an attitude that naturally directed their attention toward the mural as a format.
Although the circumstances differ today, Kuribayashi’s mural can be situated within a broader lineage of artworks conceived for public, shared spaces. Within Artist Cafe Fukuoka, this work marks the starting point of an ongoing mural project that will shape the visual identity of the facility. It stands not merely as a decorative element but as a work possessing multiple layers—conceptual, spatial, and experiential—that extend beyond the conventions of image-making for private ownership.

As mentioned earlier, Kuribayashi’s mural incorporates a cluster of mirrors arranged in a radial formation slightly to the right of center, leaving the core open. His use of mirrors—glass—originates from his ongoing visits to Fukushima following the nuclear accident. While studying nuclear technology, he learned that glass and mirrors are components used within nuclear reactors. This awareness informed the development of his work GENKI-RO and resonates again in the present mural.
Although the mural is undeniably produced through Kuribayashi’s own hand, it also incorporates pre-existing materials, namely the mirrors. In this sense, the work employs a form of collage. The painted elements—vegetation, mountains, and sky—derive from impressions accumulated during his travels across various countries, and at times from private images surfaced through dreams. Yet the mirrors introduce a distinctly public dimension, evoking issues surrounding spent nuclear fuel and the larger systems in which it is entangled.

Interestingly, the term “reflection” extends beyond the optical phenomenon produced by these mirrors. It also denotes the act of reflecting—of scrutinizing past errors, identifying their causes, and seeking ways to prevent their recurrence. In this sense, the work, while visually lucid and approachable, nonetheless reveals a stratified complexity. Through its seemingly simple surface, it engages with the multiple layers of the society to which it implicitly refers.

Taro Amano
Chief Curator
Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery