Miwa Komatsu Brings "Beyond the Eyes" to Lugano in Her First European Solo Show

46 minutes ago
5 min read

At Lugano's Museo delle Culture, the Japanese contemporary artist makes her European solo debut with a body of work that asks to be looked at — and insists, in turn, on looking back. Near the entrance hangs a wall-spanning canvas dominated by two enormous eyes set into a mass of black, spiked fur—feather, flame or windblown hair, never quite resolved. Below them, four smaller eyes stare out from a tangle of gold and crimson, ringed in teal and red like targets and cut through with streaks of scarlet. Wherever you stand in the room, something in the painting is looking back.

Step into the visionary world of Japanese artist Miwa Komatsu in Beyond the Eyes, her first European solo museum exhibition. Through powerful guardian spirits, vibrant colour, and spiritual symbolism, the exhibition explores the dialogue between humanity, nature, and the unseen. On view at MUSEC, Lugano, until 25 October 2026. — © FCM / MUSEC, Lugano

Near the entrance hangs a wall-spanning canvas dominated by two enormous eyes set into a mass of black, spiked fur—feather, flame or windblown hair, never quite resolved. Below them, four smaller eyes stare out from a tangle of gold and crimson, ringed in teal and red like targets and cut through with streaks of scarlet. Wherever you stand in the room, something in the painting is looking back.

The creature belongs to no recognisable species. Part wolf, part dragon, part imagined guardian, it establishes the terms of the encounter before the exhibition has properly begun. Looking is never a one-way act in Miwa Komatsu’s work. Her paintings do not simply invite contemplation; they return the viewer’s gaze, collapsing the distinction between observer and observed. The effect is at once unsettling and quietly meditative, suggesting that vision itself can become a form of dialogue.

That exchange of gazes forms the conceptual core of "Miwa Komatsu: Beyond the Eyes," which opened this month at the Museo delle Culture (MUSEC) and marks the Japanese artist's first solo exhibition in Europe. Organised by curator Nora Segreto in collaboration with the Tokyo-based cultural organisation Fudo Co., Ltd., the show gathers some 28 works made between 2012 and 2026 — paintings, sculpture, and an installation — several completed specifically for Lugano. It is a milestone for an artist whose work has appeared in museum and institutional settings internationally for two decades, without, until now, an equivalent foothold in Europe.

Segreto first encountered Komatsu’s work through catalogue photographs during the artist’s visit to Lugano nearly two years ago. "The first impact with her artworks was through photographs of the works," she says. "Looking at the works now, in person, feels completely different — because of the energy they express." That meeting set the terms for the show, and for its title. "Every artwork starts from a meditative moment," Segreto says, "from concentration, from meditation, from prayer. That's how she works — she meditates, and then lets everything out." The exhibition, in her framing, is an inquiry into "what's beyond ordinary life, ordinary vision, ordinary experience."

Painting Through Meditation

Komatsu paints without preparatory drawings, describing her daily meditation as the source of each work rather than its preparation — a channel, in her words, between heaven and earth. Across two decades of practice, moving through copperplate engraving, porcelain, acrylic and live painting, the consistency of her iconography gives weight to that claim: the same guardian animals, the same unblinking confrontation with the viewer, recur across mediums and years with a coherence closer to belief than to style.

Three pairs of guardian figures sit further into the exhibition—a reminder that Komatsu’s spirit world is not confined to canvas. The same watchfulness carries through into three dimensions, rendered in materials ranging from Arita porcelain to resin and FRP. The same watchfulness carries through into three dimensions, rendered in a material deeply embedded in Japanese craft traditions.

Eight of the paintings were made expressly for Lugano. Komatsu has said she worked faster on these than usual, closer to live painting though not quite that, trying to capture at speed what she felt in the Swiss mountains ahead of the show. They read as looser and more immediate than the earlier work on view, closer to sensation than to a fully settled composition.

Colour as Argument

If the gaze is the show's conceptual hinge, colour is its physical one. Komatsu paints in a register that owes nothing to observation — acid greens, electric blues, reds pushed past anything found in nature, set down in combinations that generate friction and vibration—tensions that remain part of the broader process she calls Great Harmonization. Surfaces look mid-transformation, the figures dissolving and reassembling under a current that never settles, colour standing in for something the image can't otherwise show.

MUSEC has split the exhibition into five sections — "The Gaze," "Living Nature," "Guardian Spirits," "The Power of Colour" and "Active Silence" — organised by theme rather than chronology or medium. Taken together they add up to a fairly direct curatorial thesis: that meditation, the primacy of looking, an unbroken continuity between human and non-human life, and art conceived as something closer to medicine than decoration aren't separate ideas in Komatsu's work. They're restatements of the same one, said five different ways.

From Nagano to Izumo to Lugano

The biography behind the work reads like a series of thresholds. Raised in the mountains of Nagano, Komatsu has often described the landscape as shaping her understanding of nature as a living presence rather than a backdrop. After studying copperplate engraving at Joshibi University of Art and Design in Tokyo, she deepened her engagement with calligraphy and meditation before a visit to Izumo Taisha Shrine in 2013 sharpened her understanding of colour’s symbolic power—a turning point she identifies as central to her mature practice. That same year she began working with Fudo Co., Ltd., while in 2021 she was appointed a Goodwill Ambassador by Japan’s Ministry of the Environment.

Lugano's Long Game

The exhibition also marks a first for its host: MUSEC's inaugural show dedicated to Japanese contemporary art, following earlier editions of the museum's four-year contemporary programme — what it calls its "global aesthetics" cycle — built around artists from China, the Philippines and Mozambique. "The artist is a kind of explorer of the world — almost an anthropologist," says Paolo Maiullari, MUSEC's Head of Research and Exhibitions, "bringing something new to share with everyone.”

It follows a longer relationship between Lugano and Japan. The museum has previously exhibited samurai objects and the Japan photography of Fosco Maraini. "We have a special relationship with Japan," says Roberto Badaracco, the city's Deputy Mayor for culture, sport and events. "We've staged important exhibitions there, and this is our first in contemporary art — it speaks to the modern relevance of Japanese art."

Exhibition Catalogue

An English-language catalogue, edited by Segreto, extends the exhibition beyond its own walls, presenting 42 works dated 2012 to 2026 — including works on paper that didn't make the final installation. It's effectively a fuller map of a practice the Lugano show can only partly survey: 28 pieces on view, standing in for a body of work still very much in motion.