Exhibit Introduction

Unison: Obsessive Eyes

January 21, 2025 - March 29, 2026

Unison is Mayumi Lake's ongoing body of work encompassing photography, sculpture, and installation. The project centers on forgotten objects and garments overlooked by history and dismissed by shifting systems of value. Informed by the Japanese aesthetic concept of mono no aware, an acute awareness of impermanence, Unison emerges from a desire to preserve what has faded from cultural attention and to carry fragments of the past forward as knowledge rather than nostalgia.

In ancient Japan, mythical flowers known as Housouge symbolized hope amid chaos and were believed to bloom in the afterlife. During periods of social unrest—natural disasters, epidemics, and political instability—these flowers were depicted as increasingly vivid and saturated. Today, the present feels uncannily synchronized with such historical moments. Through Housouge-inspired works in Unison, Mayumi searches for traces of hope and resilience within the turbulence of contemporary life.

Drawing from this tradition, Unison reimagines Housouge forms long buried in history using scanned floral patterns from antique girls’ kimonos, combined with toy parts, plastic flowers, sequins, and other found materials. These constructed blossoms reference my childhood in Japan while absorbing influences from American popular culture. The kimono—central to the work—functions both as a marker of cultural inheritance and as evidence of a tradition increasingly confined to ceremonial use. Within Unison, the blossoms inhabit a state of Bardo, a liminal space between life and death, mirroring my position as a cultural hybrid navigating the terrain between East and West.

Obsession is not incidental to the artist's process; it is structural. She hunts, collects, and archives forgotten kimonos, fragments of fabric, toys, and discarded objects. Each kimono element is scanned, digitized, cataloged, reconfigured, printed, hand-cut, layered, and assembled—again and again. This repeated labor becomes a sustained act of looking, enacted through the eyes and hands. Through this obsessive cycle, she confronts what feels like the fragile core of a cultural legacy—one that survives not through visibility, but through insistence.

Unison: Obsessive Eyes presents a selection of works from the ongoing Unison series alongside new pieces developed in response to the museum’s exhibition More Things Japanese. Together, these works examine obsession as a mode of preservation and cultural transmission, asking how relentless attention might operate not as fixation, but as care.

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Mayumi Lake (b.Osaka) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work explores the ideas of time, memory, and floating between the real and imaginary. With a foundation in photography, she integrates digital images of nature and Japanese textiles into her artworks to expand narrative and form conceptual layers. Lake’s artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally including Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery, Asia Society, Art in General, and Artists Space in New York; Chicago Artists Coalition and Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago; Elmhurst Art Museum in Elmhurst, Lubeznik Center for the Arts in Michigan City; the Setouchi Triennale in Takamatsu;  Fotografie Forum International in Frankfurt; Galleria PaciArte in Brescia; FOTOAMERICA in Santiago. Her work is included in the permanent collections of institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Asia Society. 

Her public artwork commissions include the City of Chicago/O’Hare Airport, Chicago Transit Authority, and  McCormick Place. She has published two monographs, Poo-Chi and Ex Post Facto, with Nazraeli Press. Lake received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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