The 1st BUG Art Award Grand Prize Winner’s Solo Exhibition The names on the beach Hikari MUKAI

Exhibition of Hikari Mukai, winner of the 1st BUG Art Award Grand Prize selected from a total of 415 entries, will be held!
We are pleased to present the 1st BUG Art Award Grand Prize Winner, Hikari Mukai’s solo exhibition “The Names on the Beach”, starting from Wednesday, February 19th, 2025. Hikari Mukai won the Grand Prize at the 1st BUG Art Award* for her work “Can’t See the Other Side”, which featured small sculptures, drawings and videos made from materials that everyone sees in their daily lives, such as straws, sand and mirrors, arranged on the sides and tops of white boxes that are about the same height as a person’s eye level. The judges praised her for her original perspective and ideas, as well as the way she had made the most of the BUG space in her exhibition. The aim of this exhibition is to support artists in their careers and encourage them to take on new challenges in their work.

Mukai values the process of giving form to the intuitive images that come to mind in everyday life. For example, she observes the way in which the movement of cars is controlled by the rules they follow, or the way in which the light shines through the bleached cloth floating in a bucket of water, and creates works based on these observations of the small details that we tend to overlook in our daily lives.

Since her time as a student at the Musashino Art University, Department of Sculpture, she has consistently created small three-dimensional works that can be held in both hands, combining familiar materials such as wood chips, glass and paper clay.
In this exhibition, she will use every inch of the 7.2m high ceiling space to create her largest-scale new work to date. Please come and see Mukai’s solo exhibition, which she has been preparing for about a year since winning the Bug Award.

_{* The BUG Art Award is an award for artists who have been active as an artist for less than 10 years. We provide feedback from the judges, hold consultation meetings about exhibitions and installation, provide other support, and we are also involved in the artists’ growth during the judging process.}