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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 riddles of texture and composition, pulsating with a strange vitality, even a glint of poison in Summer Blossoms (2024).
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.
