PLATO

Plato is proud to announce Okku/Beyond the Light, the first solo exhibition by New York-based artist Shuto Okayasu (b. 1990, Saitama, Japan) featuring paintings, drawings, and ceramic sculpture.

 

Shuto Okayasu’s oeuvre is influenced by artistic forms from his native Japan, such as Nihonga, woodblock prints and manga, with their accent of flatness of images and distinct outlines, as well as by Western painting, characterized by realistic representation and suggestion of three-dimensional space. Encompassing a myriad of references – from pop culture and music videos to film and cartoons, from poetry to Buddhist and Christian symbolism, Okayasu’s works reflect his diverse, multicultural interests while pointing to the oneness of humanity.

 

The title of the exhibition, Okku/Beyond the Light was inspired by ‘Love is okku,’ a line from the post-war poet Tanikawa Shuntaro – an important influence on the artist, who also explored the cosmic in daily life. The word ‘okku’ 億劫 originated as a Buddhist term that represented a length of time too long to measure – a hundred million eons, which was connected to the creation of the universe. Perhaps as it is an incomprehensible number for a human mind to fathom, today the word signifies a sense of being reluctant towards doing something because it seems tedious or bothersome. Okayasu found this amusing linguistic oxymoron – a merger of mundane tedium and sublime eternity – to be a precise summation of his recent works.

 

Portals into eternity and islands of peace are ever-present in the midst of a most ordinary city life: musicians enlivening the streets with moments of escape, chess players at Union Square deeply immersed in an all-consuming game, lovers communing at a bar. East and West, New York City streets and green meadows, enormous galaxies and tiny mementos, European old masters and anime — it’s a show about distant worlds and incomparable scales existing within the same space-time continuum.

 

Okayasu's paintings are easter eggs of meanings in which objects and places refer to concepts and creators across centuries and continents. The central painting in the show, Love is Okku depicts a New York living-room scene transposed onto a blooming field. A toy-like local bodega overlooks the ocean with Japanese mountains in the distance. Lotus flowers, a nod to Ito Yakuchu, an Edo period master and a familiar sight in Okayasu’s hometown, are coupled with a bouquet of lilies — a symbol of annunciation in Christian iconography — immortalizing the artist's expecting wife. An enormous galaxy 200,000 light-years away in the shape of a wreath, representing eternal life, is depicted on a small laptop screen. Dualities – male and female, sunrise and sunset, natural and urban environment, tiny butterflies and immense planetary formations coexist in a cyclical flow of life. 

 

In New Dream Land, a corner store in Queens invites a sleepwalker into its glowing façade resembling a circus entrance. Sleep blurs the boundaries of time and space. Elsewhere throughout the show, a subway station turns into a concert hall or an underground temple; a stone pyramid on a deserted hill becomes a portal to a faraway home across the planet; a littered pavement is a moonlit desert, peppered with discarded remnants of daytime dreams, infused with sleepy loneliness of midnight nostalgia. Everyday life is filled with moments of communion – with nature, with divine music, with the spirits of the city permeating the multitude of manmade objects. New York, like love, is okku. It is bothersome and tediously immense, but eternity is present around every corner.  

 

Shuto Okayasu (b. 1990, Saitama, Japan) is a visual artist based in New York. Okayasu’s paintings and drawings reflect his everyday reality and dreams, mixing eastern and western sensibilities. His work records both mundane and transcendent aspects of urban living, and the often-unpredictable scenarios he encounters in New York City. Okayasu uses drawing and photography as a reference point for his patchworked painterly collages referencing such diverse sources as film, hip-hop culture, traditional Japanese painting and woodblock prints, manga, anime, abstract expressionism and European old masters.

 

Okayasu received his BFA from Tokyo Zokei University. He has apprenticed with two of perhaps the most well-known Japanese contemporary artists outside of Japan: Takashi Murakami (2012-13, Saitama, Japan) and Tomokazu Matsuyama (2015-2021, New York). Okayasu has participated in numerous solo and group exhibition internationally, including PLATO, New York (2025, 2024); Tang Contemporary, Hong Kong (2024); Kyoto Tsutaya, Kyoto, Japan (2024); The Rockefeller Center, New York (2023); Oil Gallery Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan (2023); Ginza Tsutaya Ginza Six, Tokyo, Japan (2022); Space 776 Gallery, New York (2021, 2020, 2018) and Greenpoint Gallery, New York (2018), among others.