E'Wao Kagoshima @ Center for Art, Research and Alliances

Installation views of E'wao Kagoshima: Animated Minds, on view at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), New York, from September 20 through December 14, 2025. Courtesy the artist and CARA. Photos: Kris Graves

By PETER KELLY December 2, 2025

E’Wao Kagoshima: Animated Minds, the first retrospective of the Niigata-born, New York-based artist is on view now at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) through December 14th. The show highlights the eclectic oeuvre of an artist whose work–despite its sporadic exhibition history–maintains a dedicated cult-following. Co-curators Reiko Tomii and Rahul Gudipudi outline an arc of Kagoshima’s career in a thoughtful and cohesive exhibition, providing scholarly context to the prolific but reclusive artist’s work.

This overdue retrospective is a culmination of CARA’s inaugural Fellowship Program. The Center is a newer, revisionist venue offering substantial grant and collaborative research opportunities to independent scholars as well as mid-to-late-career artists. Animated Minds highlights CARA’s mission: to expand the canon of contemporary art history to include deserving, under-appreciated figures. Kagoshima’s place in art history is bolstered by an in-depth associated essay by Tomii (perhaps the most significant and comprehensive writing on the artist to date). 

The exhibition design hinges on another mission-based New York City curatorial program which included Kagoshima in its inaugural season: the New Museum’s 1983 WorkSpace series, curated by Lynn Gumpert. Kagoshima was one of three artists, alongside Eleanor Dube and Jamie Summers, to christen a designated gallery at the New Museum’s 583 Broadway location. The 1983 show’s centrality in CARA’s retrospective posits it as a career-defining moment for the artist, and one of several shifts away from a proclivity towards more solitary art-making.

To understand its impact on Kagoshima’s career, it is important to understand what WorkSpace was: an experimental series highlighting the New Museum’s commitment to emerging talent. These exhibitions encouraged atypical engagement with the gallery space by creating a “non-object-oriented,” installation-focused environment that was equal parts gallery and artist’s studio.[1] Kagoshima took the opportunity to create a maximalist installation, a veritable gesamtkunstwerk, immersing museum visitors in his process. The space was continuously edited during the exhibition’s run. Found objects were added as installation elements: tables found on the sidewalk became pedestals and an angled stick buttressed a work on paper to allow a stream of natural light into the room.[2] The artist chose an avant-garde display technique in order to subvert conventional object hierarchies–a floor-to-ceiling, three-dimensional, salon style “environment.” Free-standing paintings sat on the gallery floor, vertically and horizontally oriented two-dimensional works were draped along a wire stretching wall-to-wall or ceiling-to-wall, conventionally stretched canvases were wall-mounted angle-on.[3] The platform provided Kagoshima with an avenue to highlight his dialogue with and his singularity from his New York City contemporaries.

Installation views of E'wao Kagoshima: Animated Minds, on view at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), New York, from September 20 through December 14, 2025. Courtesy the artist and CARA. Photos: Kris Graves

The floor to ceiling presentation of paintings on Kraft paper installed in CARA’s second floor galleries recontextualizes the New Museum works as individual objects, while paying homage to their original installation. Kagoshima’s formative discovery of this material occurred during the 1983 exhibition. Like many found objects in the show, the discovery of kraft paper was purely happenstance. The painter found the material at a hardware store in his neighborhood and with it began a process of aggressive experimentation.[4] An added bonus: the material was extremely economical. These works frequently contain surreal depictions of religious images, disembodied text, abstract forms, and dreamlike passages.

Kagoshima’s work and biography are presented in detail in Tomii’s associated essay, E’Wao Kagoshima: Morphology of the Animated Mind. His influences, references, and visual language are singular and eclectic–as such they are often inscrutable. His work is dynamic, peculiar, and unnerving. It is utterly idiosyncratic. Often tangentially associated with art movements of the 1980s–Figuration Libre, Mutant International, the burgeoning street art and downtown graffiti movements–all populisms stressing atypical, low-art media and depictions of the gritty “postmodern” urban landscape.[5] Additionally, a broad network of historical influences has hindered the work landing squarely in one primary movement or association. Tomii’s essay does well to build an unnamed context for Kagoshima’s work. Assemblage elements in works like Pulse (2012/2025) demonstrate an interest in Joseph Cornell. His early formal relationship to figuration, illustrated succinctly through two untitled 1970 drawings, was informed by a voracious interest in the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism–an Austrian art movement of the 1940s and 50s that paired esoteric images with a naturalistic lens. The delicate balance between Kagoshima’s realist and surrealist tendencies are better understood through the context of this early influence.

Installation views of E'wao Kagoshima: Animated Minds, on view at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), New York, from September 20 through December 14, 2025. Courtesy the artist and CARA. Photos: Kris Graves

The first floor gallery presents a small survey of Kagoshima’s work “Pre-Workspace.” A grid of collages expounds on the artist’s life in Japan. Like his paintings and other works on paper, the compositions focus on disjointed bodies with ambiguous boundaries. Again, text floats through many of the works as comedic fragments or poetic gestures. Kagoshima followed his self-guided research on the Western Canon to Tokyo’s Ginza gallery district and the Jena Bookstore. The bookstore provided the young artist with research and material opportunities–with copious international art and design magazines available for study and purchase. Some of these magazines can be seen in this gallery, visual fragments that record an emerging artist’s burgeoning interests.

Between the 1990s and his inclusion in the 2010 MoMA PS1’s Greater New York, the multimedia artist rarely exhibited. During this time he spent 10 years working on his Diptychs series, on prominent display in Animated Minds, and contextualized within the artist’s introspective approach to artmaking. Exhibited as a group, and following the pacing of the exhibition, the works comprise a gallery representing a “post-WorkSpace” survey. Each painting is a meditation on Abstract Expressionism–two side-by-side panels presenting a sort of rorschach exercise, ascribing monochrome figurative forms to colorfully impastoed, gestural abstractions. Associative images are presented within a serialized head, with a heart covering its forehead. Inside each heart is a figurative re-interpretation–a line of red paint becomes a flamingo in flight, some blue a cascading waterfall.

Installation views of E'wao Kagoshima: Animated Minds, on view at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), New York, from September 20 through December 14, 2025. Courtesy the artist and CARA. Photos: Kris Graves

The tongue-in-cheek refusal to accept the notion of “pure abstraction” is true both to an underlying punk ethos, and a guiding aspiration to depict shinshō (心象)–loosely translated to forms of the mind. In an associated essay for the WorkSpace exhibition, Robin Dodds ascribes this focus to an east/west binary. Western painting emphasizes representation while eastern traditions prioritize an impression of an image rather than a literal re-telling.[6] Real and surreal, Kagoshima’s interior world is made visible in his work. The exhibition title, Animated Minds, reflects this ephemeral pursuit. This pursuit remains consistent through the artist’s ever-changing relationship to private art-marking and public display.

[1] “Series.” New Museum Digital Archive. Accessed December 1, 2025. https://archive.newmuseum.org/series/1539.

[2] Reiko Tomii, “Center for Art, Research and Alliances / Cara,” CARA, September 2025, https://www.cara-nyc.org/research/ewao-kagoshima-morphology-of-the-animated-mind.

[3] Robin Dodds, “WorkSpace: E’Wao Kagoshima,” New Museum, January 15, 1983, https://d2b8urneelikat.cloudfront.net/media/collectiveaccess/images/1/6/5/14840_ca_object_representations_media_16558_original.pdf.

[4] Tomii 2025

[5] Brandon Eng, “Center for Art, Research and Alliances / Cara,” CARA, September 2025, https://www.cara-nyc.org/research/one-eye-heads-ewao-kagoshimas-mutants-in-the-city.

[6] Dodds 1983