☆(Book Mark): Fu Nagasawa

COHJU is pleased to present ⭐︎ (Book Mark), a solo exhibition by Fu Nagasawa.
This exhibition marks Nagasawa’s first solo show, and his second exhibition at COHJU, following a two-person exhibition held here two years ago.

Fu Nagasawa completed his MFA at Kyoto University of the Arts in 2025. Since his time as a student, he has drawn upon anonymous forms and imagery found in East Asian visual culture, including ceramics from the Joseon dynasty as well as folk painting and folk craft from the medieval to early modern periods. Working with methods such as tracing and transfer, Nagasawa’s practice does not emphasize individual authorship or notions of completion. Instead, it focuses on forms that have been handed down through repetition, and on images that exist at the boundaries between utility and decoration, art and everyday life. This approach forms the foundation of his work and has attracted significant attention.

In his previous works, Nagasawa has not simply reproduced historical imagery, but has engaged with images that have persisted through time while undergoing transformation and shifts in meaning. Within this process, modern value systems—such as originality versus reproduction, or authorship versus anonymity—are quietly relativized, raising questions about how images are inherited, altered, and forgotten.

In ⭐︎ (Book Mark), Nagasawa extends this line of inquiry toward traces that once held meaning but now remain suspended: bookmarks attached to maps and articles, places and images that once existed, and visual forms that have already fulfilled their original roles. A bookmark is, by nature, a marker intended for future reference; yet over time, the very object it points to may disappear. The exhibition title ⭐︎ (Book Mark) suggests a state in which such displaced marks and symbols continue to exist, even after losing their destination.

While the works in this exhibition employ processes such as the appropriation and tracing of historical images, Nagasawa also presents new works that incorporate techniques and approaches different from his previous practice. Rather than serving as means to generate entirely new imagery, these processes function as acts of recalling, displacing, and reconfiguring images and signs that already exist. In doing so, the relationships between meaning and form, memory and record are unsettled, allowing images to drift freely, detached from fixed interpretations.

⭐︎ (Book Mark) is an exhibition that begins with remnants of what has disappeared and traces that appear to have lost their meaning, asking how images are preserved, transformed, and potentially re-referenced over time. We warmly invite you to experience the exhibition.

ARTIST STATEMENT 

As a habit, I bookmark maps and articles, but once I discovered that a shop I had marked years ago had already closed. The shop was no longer there, yet the mark remained. As time passes, many things disappear while new ones are created. The fragments left behind may no longer retain meaning or form, but they offer clues for thought.