Artist: Susumu Kamijo

Text written by Paige Haran

In Susumu Kamijo’s latest exhibition, Table for Us at Perrotin Hong Kong, the artist steps sideways into the realm of still life, only to transform the genre with a sleight of hand that feels at once candid and elusive. Known for his playful, abstract paintings of poodles and other sentient forms, Kamijo here shifts gears into a more intimate space, where florals and creatures coalesce in arrangements that hover between fantasy and familiarity. What appears to be a traditional still life at first blush—Morandi-esque vases, plates of food, large goldfish with petal-like fins bulging in their bowls—quickly dissolves into into riddles of texture and composition, pulsating with a strange vitality, even a glint of poison in Summer Blossoms (2024).

It’s as if Kamijo is constructing scenes not from life around us, but from a place of suggestion, memory, and half-glimpsed reverie. Each piece becomes a chimera: an assemblage of everyday objects and animals that evoke a distant world. On a table beside a bird, feathery petals in the painting Red Flower and Pigeon (2024) spread their wings, reaching the eye into the negative space above. Kamijo’s previous devotion to the poodle now feels incidental; the animal itself served less as a focus than as a gateway for his experiments in form, color, and design. That impulse spills over into the new work, reaching further to touch a more personal nerve. Behind these seemingly quotidian markers lies a fierce fidelity to composition as well as a longing for some summer idyll—a space where childhood remembrances mingle freely with the brine of the ocean and the heat of languorous afternoons.

Kamijo, in fact, grew up far from the warmth of the coast, in the mountainous region of Nagano, a landlocked enclave in Japan. His paintings bear no explicit landmarks, yet the flat horizon, contrasting with the rugged backdrop of his childhood, and the recurring sailor's cap quietly hint at a deep-seated longing for the sea, a yearning that ripples through his work as persistently as it did through his early years.

The still lifes are steeped in nostalgia, conjuring summers spent with his grandparents, the taste of watermelon, and the fleeting joys of festival nights. The red and blue goldfish swimming in bowls nod to kingyo sukui, the beloved summer game of goldfish scooping, where children raced against the fragility of paper nets in hope of taking a fish home. These memories, as gossamer-thin as the nets themselves, linger beneath the surface, shaping Kamijo's dreamlike arrangements.

In his application of color, Kamijo alludes to the color-field painters and the amorphous textures of Philip Guston. Broad arenas of blue, orange, and green acquire unexpected depth beneath a gauzy topcoat. At times, his stone-washed flower vases smolder with a sensuous intensity, as seen in the densely packed bloomscape of Summer Blossoms (2024). Despite the simple forms and the more uniform palette of past works, Kamijo’s brilliance as a colorist shines throughout Table for Us. In Three Fishes and Cosmos (2024), he conjures an elusive hue for the placemat and vase, reminiscent of Van Gogh’s mineral-infused green.

Three Fishes and Cosmos (2024) also delves into a theme threaded throughout the exhibition and the still life tradition: mortality and domesticity. The fish, their vividly colored heads stark against exposed skeletons, volley between the delectable and the disconcerting—vibrant yet lifeless. Does stilling life in paint extinguish its wilderness?

The paintings on view at Perrotin Hong Kong draw the viewer in further: What do the containers that trace and hold each flower, fish, and meal signify? Are these haloed hard edges armor, portals, or prisons? There’s a sense of packaging in Kamijo’s work, as though each element were embalmed in a delicate protective film, suspended just before the point of decay. Echoing Matisse’s decorative cut-out strategies, the utensils are plotted out, almost plastic-wrapped, as separate entities, while the persimmons and pears look like fruit stickers. Each form is carefully outlined, its matte yet painterly tones crisply delineated, as if to hold the objects at a distance. Kamijo’s characteristic sharpness is also grounded in the aesthetic idiom of old Japanese masters such as Itō Jakuchū and Kiyokata Kaburagi. The contained patches of color resemble Jakuchū’s mid-Edo woodblock prints, where swallows and parrots are backlit in a red or white outline.

While Kamijo’s paintings assert cultural references and geography, time remains abstract and garbled. The sun could be setting or rising on the horizon line; objects could be contemporary or nostalgic. In John Ashbery’s 1991 poem The Improvement, he reminds us: “We never live long enough in our lives / to know what today is like.” This sentiment resonates within Table for Us. The works serve as pseudo still lifes—still frames imagined rather than simply observed. Yet, even the most quintessenial still lifes are, in a sense, counterfeit: an attempt to portray a present that forever eludes capture.

Born in Nagano, Japan in 1975, Susumu Kamijo lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He holds a BFA at the University of Oregon (2000) and an MFA in Painting and Drawing at the University of Washington (2002). Influenced by Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, his poodles have attracted significant attention ever since they first appeared in 2014. The quick drying vinyl paint that Kamijo uses for his painting makes every painting––in his own words––“a quick resolution.” The technique of painting quickly to capture something that is authentic is one that Kamijo attributes to his experience of learning Japanese calligraphy as a young man. His own interest in creative writing has also lent a narrative “style” to his paintings that mimics the minimalism of a poem and the surprise of a short story. By mingling drawing and painting techniques, the artist has been able to create an assemblage of symbols and signs, often in ethereal and menacing strokes of color. In a playful meditative style, his work continues to evolve in a direction that surprises, provokes, and transforms our ways of seeing.