STANDING PINE

STANDING PINE Tokyo is pleased to announce “PORTRAIT”, a group exhibition opening on Saturday, July 5. The exhibition brings together six artists: Emily Andersen (UK), Tobias Kappel (Germany), Yoshihiro Sakurai (Japan), Thomas Gillant (France), Lucas Foletto Celinski (Brazil), and Noritoshi Hirakawa (Japan).

While diverging from the traditional notions of portraiture evoked by the term itself, this exhibition seeks to reengage with its essential concerns. The participating artists’ works encompass layered themes: image, documentation, embodiment, sexuality, and time, each offering new perspectives on the relationship between subject and artwork.

Emily Andersen creates photographic works that quietly capture the remains of abandoned industrial facilities and the interiors of urban architecture, revealing poetic stillness and traces of memory embedded within the everyday. Since the 1980s, she has also continued to pursue portrait photography, depicting a wide range of celebrated figures, including Nan Goldin, featured in this exhibition, as well as notable writers, poets, filmmakers, actors, and architects. Her work consistently reflects a refined aesthetic sensitivity to atmosphere and poetic expression. Moreover, through the medium of photography, she has engaged in a sustained inquiry into the language of portraiture, the concept of time, and the representation of memory, while diligently examining the process by which the everyday is transformed into a still image.

In an era when photography is no longer confined to mirroring reality, Tobias Kappel explores new possibilities in image-making. His works navigate the in-between space of analogue and digital processes, transcending genre boundaries while questioning the authenticity and finality of visual expression. “impssbl’s nthng (2019)”, part of his ‘brother’ series, was created using the functions of an all-in-one printer. Embracing the noise and errors that emerge during processes of scanning and duplication, the work critically and playfully investigates how machines ‘see’ and ‘interpret’ visual information.

Yoshihiro Sakurai’s “Untitled (#5)” and “Untitled (#7)” (both 2025) are based on backstage scenes he photographed during a Paris fashion show in 2002. Capturing the tension and exhilaration that pervade the world of haute couture, along with the subtle expressions of the models, these photographs offer a perspective that surpasses mere documentation. Now, after 23 years, they emerge as a quiet narrative where memory and time intersect. In his latest works, Sakurai delineates the contours of human existence through the themes of “anonymity,” “collectivity,” and a “sense of absence.” While the artist remains unseen, the figures who immerse themselves in its lingering presence quietly emerge as portraits engraved in memory and emotion. The crowd that appears through the mist, though composed of isolated individuals, collectively forms a singular emotional mass. In this space, the boundaries of the individual dissolve, and only a shared ‘presence’ or ‘sensitivity’ quietly emerges.

Installed in dialogue with the exhibition space, Thomas Gillant’s sculptural works draw attention to their negative spaces. These installations resonate with the visual interplay found in his drawing practice, an exploration of perceptual tension between surface and depth, where illusions of spatiality emerge and dissolve. By approaching space as an autonomous identity in itself, Gillant’s installations generate a spatial presence that seems to render a portrait not of a person, but of space itself.

Lucas Foletto Celinski’s work explores the body as a site of both constraint and liberation, focusing on queer sexuality and the nuances of pleasure, as well as the intense physical sensations of embodied experience. His practice employs tactile, craft-based methods such as jewellery making, textile work, analogue photography, and hand printing, using material processes to evoke sensorial engagement with the body. His photo-montage series ‘La Petite Mort’ presents a more intimate scale, offering a poetic reflection on fundamental themes such as pleasure, love, and death. The series delicately captures fleeting, transcendent moments at the edge of sensation, using techniques including analogue photomontage, multiple exposure, silkscreen, and photo transfer to other media. These works juxtapose images of lovers and friends engaged in BDSM with classical sculptural representations of the nude, erotic body, establishing a dialogue between private, intimate encounters and public portrayals of sensuality.

Noritoshi Hirakawa’s photographic series ‘The anima’s talent’ begins with the Jungian psychological concept of the “anima.” Rather than interpreting the anima as a mere archetype of femininity within the male psyche, Hirakawa redefines it as a latent form of masculinity residing within the female subject. In this series, women perform this internal male image—the anima—as a role, revealing a paradoxical process in which they embody not femininity itself, but the “femininity-as-other” through the lens of internalised masculinity. Drawing on gendered performance traditions such as Kabuki and the Takarazuka Revue, Hirakawa approaches the structures of pleasure and identity that arise from this layered performance. The act of enacting the anima becomes a form of visual oscillation between femininity and masculinity, questioning fixed notions of gender and representation. In this presentation, Japanese model Akina Minami performs the role of the anima, rendering visible the fluid interplay between masculine and feminine in photographic form.

Throughout the exhibition, the ‘differences’ that emerge in dialogue with these works become entangled with the viewer’s personal memories and experiences, quietly prompting a reconsideration of what portraiture, as a form of expression, can be.


Date: Saturday, 5 July – Saturday, 26 July, 2025
Hours: 12:00 – 18:00 (From Tuesday to Saturday)
Closed on Sundays, Mondays, and national holidays
Opening reception: Saturday, 5 July, 17:00 – 19:00 (artists in attendance)

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Emily Andersen
Emily Andersen is a London-based artist whose photographic practice explores themes of portraiture, urban and architectural interiors, and layered notions of memory and time. A graduate of the Royal College of Art, she has exhibited internationally at institutions including The Photographers’ Gallery and ICA (London), The Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, The Scottish National Portrait Gallery (Edinburgh), MASS MoCA (USA), Jehangir Art Gallery (Mumbai), China Arts Museum (Shanghai), as well as BOOKMARC GALLERY and LOWW Gallery (Tokyo). Her portraits are held in the collection of The National Portrait Gallery, London, and she has received accolades in the field of portraiture, including the John Kobal Award.

Nan Goldin. / 2022 / 375× 375mm / Archival Pigment Print / ed 5 + AP

Tobias Kappel
Born in Potsdam in 1987, Tobias Kappel studied Visual Communication at Muthesius University of Fine Arts in Kiel, Germany, with a focus on multimedia photography and technical imaging. During his studies, he received a DAAD scholarship and spent time working in New York. His work has been exhibited at institutions including C/O Berlin (Berlin), Museum Kunst der Westküste (Föhr Island, Germany), Alfred Ehrhardt Stiftung (Berlin), Frontviews (Berlin), and the CONTACT Photography Festival (Toronto). In addition to his artistic practice, Kappel contributes to platforms such as the podcast Fotografie Neu Denken, C4 Journal, and Fototreff Berlin. In recent years, he has gained recognition for his experimental and critically engaged approach to photography.

mpssbl 's nthng / 2019 / 450 × 600mm
Inkjet Print Mounted on an Alucore Panel / Unique

Yoshihiro Sakurai
Yoshihiro Sakurai moved to France in the late 1990s to study fashion, enrolling in a fashion school in Paris. During a temporary return to Japan in 2000, he began teaching himself photography. In 2001, he returned to Paris and, after photographing a collection produced by a fashion house involving a close friend, he began working officially as a backstage photographer for runway shows. His photographs, taken from a perspective distinct from standard documentation, were later developed into the series ‘Shining in the Shadow – ETUDE 25 to 48’, which focuses on the passage of time and the nature of memory.

Untitled #5 / 2019 / 450 × 600mm / Gelatin Silver Print /  ed 5

Thomas Gillant
Born in France, Thomas Gillant holds a Master’s degree in Fine Arts and is currently based in Tokyo. His practice involves layering spray-painted oil onto the canvas to create works that oscillate between flatness and perceived depth. While the surface remains physically smooth, the gestural brushwork and harmonised colour palette generate ambiguous visual spaces. His approach blurs the boundary between painterly and digital aesthetics, prompting a reconsideration of how pictorial space is perceived.

Comer elevation, hollowed-out / 2025 / 550 × 550 × 550mm 10cm depth / Jesmonite / Unique

Lucas Foletto Celinski
Lucas Foletto Celinski is an interdisciplinary artist born in Brazil. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He holds a Master's Degree from the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, Germany. Recent projects include: Novel Pleasures (in collaboration with James Richards) at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2024), Let Life Be Beautiful Like Summer Flower at Wehrmuehle (2023), Body-Modification as Artistic Practice - Lecture, APP, Las Vegas (2023), Archiv-Salon: Queer Pleasure & Pain at Schwules Museum, Berlin (2022), Tender Traces at OR Gallery-Yuan Museum, Chongqing (2021), Intimacy: New Queer Art From Berlin and Beyond at Schwules Museum, Berlin (2021), Libidinal Motion at Galerie Delmes & Zander, Cologne (2018), Suture Pénétrable at Standing Pine Gallery, Nagoya (2017), Passion at Museum Ludwig, Budapest (2016), Slash: In Between the Normative and the Fantasy at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga (2015), Berlin Artists’ Statements at BWA Contemporary Art Gallery, Katowice (2015) and Bedded-Down Knot at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2015).

Fixation Nature / 2024 / 71.5 x 61.5 cm (framed) / Unique
Black and white photograph, hand-printed on baryta paper.
Hand-printed passepartout by the artist

Noritoshi Hirakawa
Born in Fukuoka in 1960, Noritoshi Hirakawa has been based in New York since 1993. After studying applied sociology, he began his artistic practice in 1988 and has since established himself as an internationally recognised contemporary artist. Working across a wide range of media, including photography, video, dance, installation, and performance, Hirakawa has presented his work in over 300 exhibitions at museums, art centres, and galleries worldwide.

He has participated in major international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale (Venice), Site Santa Fe Biennial (New Mexico), and Istanbul Biennale (Istanbul), and has shown at renowned institutions including MoMA PS1 (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt), Leeum (Seoul), and Ginza Maison Hermès-Le Forum (Tokyo). His works are held in prominent collections such as M+ Museum (Hong Kong), Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (Tokyo), CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, and Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt), among others.

The anima’s talent / 2014.2016 / 45.7 x 30.4 cm (print size)
C-Print (Fuji Crystal Archive) / ed 10

In collaboration with: LOWW Gallery

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