Rei Naito: breath
Peder Lund, Oslo
November 22, 2025 – February 14, 2026
Peder Lund presents an exhibition with the eminent Japanese artist Rei Naito (b. 1961, Hiroshima). Renowned for her delicate installations, sculptures, and works on paper that explore the incomprehensible fact of life itself, Rei Naito invites visitors into an atmosphere of quiet reflection on breath, spirit, and our shared existence. At the heart of her practice lies the enduring question: "Is simply existing on this earth a blessing in itself?"
To encounter a work by Rei Naito is to enter a space of heightened awareness — of one's own body, one's breath, and of life itself as a fleeting yet shared condition. Over the past forty years, Naito has devoted her practice to what she has described as "the incomprehensible fact that we are alive in this world." Her works do not impose meaning so much as they stage conditions in which meaning arises — ephemeral, delicate, and deeply intimate.
Central to Naito's art is the concept of breath. For Rei Naito, breath is at once invisible and palpable, a paradoxical force that affirms life precisely because it cannot be contained or possessed. In the sculptural installation tama/anima (please breathe life into me) (2025), a narrow gutter of water shimmers with subtle movement. The work unites two linguistic roots: tama, the Japanese word for spirit or soul, and anima, the Latin root for breath. The piece quietly insists that to live is to participate in this exchange of air and water, of spirit and body. It epitomizes her conviction that art, at its most essential, is a vessel for the life force that cannot be owned but only experienced.
Her commitment to this elemental aesthetic was seen in her 2023 exhibition at the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, where tama/anima appeared in dialogue with color beginning. The series color beginning originated in 2021 as a pair of paper works exhibited at MtK Contemporary Art in Kyoto. In 2024, at the Tokyo National Museum, Rei Naito introduced the expanded title color beginning/breath with the addition of "breath." These exhibitions deepened a process that now culminates in Oslo, where paintings and sculptural works form a single, sustained inhalation and exhalation across space.
If tama/anima embodies the vital currents of water and spirit, Naito's works on paper register breath in another register. The series developed out of a daily practice of attuning to light and atmosphere. For Naito, each work is not an image but a lived exhalation, a veil of color that makes palpable the moment of its own making. Positioning herself at a point removed from form, Naito explores moments when mind, hands, fingers, paper, paint, water, and brush become one. Her painting media shift and go through cycles; Rei Naito employs brushes, spoons, paper, canvas, flannel, paint tubes, tissue, and even branches, awakening physical and mental instincts that transcend human will. Many of the works exhibited at Peder Lund were painted using branches; the final piece completed with a branch gathered in Oslo. This method liberates her and the countless lives dwelling in the unconscious, guiding her toward the essence of human nature.
During preparations for her recent exhibitions, Rei Naito began to perceive the white surfaces of her paintings as "matrix" spaces — living grounds where color reveals air and light within, generating phenomena akin to her spatial works. The presentation at Peder Lund extends this understanding: paintings and sculptural works intertwine, exploring the indivisibility of life and death. The works reveal a world in which everything — objects, people, animals, plants, air, light, the departed and the unborn — interweaves inseparably with our own breath.
Crucially, Rei Naito refuses to frame these drawings. To do so, she explains, would seal them off from the atmosphere of the world, contradicting their very essence. The works are intended to breathe with the space in which they are shown, their edges unprotected, their surfaces vulnerable. Like breaths, they must remain porous, inseparable from the air around them. Installed unframed, the drawings ask the viewer to approach gently, to encounter them not as objects but as presences — fragile, momentary, and inseparable from the act of perception itself.
The unframed condition also signals Naito's insistence on site specificity. She creates works only after visiting a space, allowing the encounter with its light, scale, and atmosphere to shape the form of what she produces. Her art is never autonomous but always relational, responsive to place. This principle is most famously evident in Matrix (2010) at the Teshima Art Museum, designed with Ryue Nishizawa, where water droplets form and disperse endlessly across a concrete floor, inextricable from the architecture and its natural surroundings. But the same principle governs her paper works: each is conceived as a beginning rather than a closed composition, a color-breath that expands into the environment of its display.
Naito's commitment to fragility and specificity has been affirmed by a series of major institutional exhibitions. At the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura, she realised Tout animal est dans le monde comme de l'eau à l'intérieur de l'eau (2009–10), a pivotal, site-specific project that marked a turning point in her practice; the work has since been revisited from the collection at the Museum of Modern Art, Hayama (2022–23). More recently, the Tokyo National Museum presented come and live – go and live (June–September 2024), an exhibition conceived in direct dialogue with the museum's architecture and holdings, extending her site-responsive ethos across multiple galleries. At the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, she created a suite of acrylic works that responded directly to the changing light of the museum's modernist galleries.
Other works in the present exhibition extend these concerns materially. The balloon sculpture Two Lives (2025) contains air as its medium — literal breath held in nylon forms, suspended by thread, subject to the slightest shift in atmosphere. The wool cluster color beginning (2025) suggests both cellular growth and cosmic formation, inviting the viewer to contemplate life at scales both intimate and infinite. Together, these works reinforce Naito's conviction that existence is contingent, provisional, and always shared.
Rei Naito first came to international attention with her participation in the 1997 Venice Biennale, where her installation One Place on Earth permitted a single visitor at a time to enter a fragile, translucent chamber. That radical gesture defined her subsequent practice: art as encounter, both profoundly personal and inseparable from the larger shared condition of being. Later projects have expanded this vocabulary to architectural scale, but always with the same insistence on fragility, intimacy, and breath.
In a contemporary art landscape often dominated by spectacle, Naito's works stand as quiet resistances. They ask us to attend to what is smallest, most fleeting, and most vital. In doing so, she belongs to a lineage of artists — from Eva Hesse and Agnes Martin to James Turrell — who reveal the immaterial through subtle means. Yet Naito's contribution is distinct: her art insists not only on perception but on coexistence. To breathe with her works is to recognize the breath we share with others, with animals, with the environment itself.
Rei Naito's art is neither doctrinal nor programmatic. Though she draws on the resonances of spiritual traditions, she remains outside any one system of belief. What she offers instead is art as lived metaphysics: an opportunity to experience the fact of existence, not through abstraction but through the simplest of means — water, light, color, air, and above all, breath. Her works are not objects to be possessed but conditions to be entered into. They remind us, gently but with insistence, that to be alive is to be fragile, connected, and sustained by breath.
Rei Naito has been honored with solo exhibitions at various esteemed institutions, including The National Museum of Art, Osaka (1995); Karmeliterkloster, Frankfurt am Main (1997); The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura, Kanagawa (2009); Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum, Tokyo (2014); The Japan Cultural Institute in Paris (2017); Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv (2017); Contemporary Art Center, Art Tower Mito, Ibaraki (2018); 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Ishikawa; and Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München, Munich (2023).
Permanent installations include Being given (Kinza, Art House Project, Naoshima, Kagawa, 2001) and Matrix (Teshima Art Museum, Teshima, Kagawa, 2010). Awards received include Promising Artists and Scholars of Contemporary Japanese Arts by Japan Arts Foundation (1994); 1st Asahi Beer Arts Awards by Asahi Beer Arts Foundation (2003); 60th Mainichi Art Prize (2018); and 69th Minister of Education Award for Fine Arts (2019).
This is the first solo exhibition of Rei Naito's work in Scandinavia.
PEDER LUND
Tjuvholmen allé 27, 0252 Oslo
