Flowing, a catalog essay by Elsa Coustou of Yu Nishimura’s exhibition “Towards a Sea”, presented by Lafayette Anticipations.

Flowing, a catalog essay by Elsa Coustou of Yu Nishimura’s exhibition "Towards a Sea", presented by Lafayette Anticipations.

This article is an excerpt from "FLOWING", a text by Elsa Coustou published in the catalog for Yu Nishimura’s exhibition "Towards a Sea" at Lafayette Anticipations. The exhibition runs from October 21, 2026, to January 3, 2027, at 9, rue du Plâtre, 75004 Paris.

"There is nothing staid, nothing settled, in this universe. All is rippling, all is dancing; all is quickness and triumph." Virginia Woolf, The Waves

In the exhibition Towards a Sea, Yu Nishimura takes us towards a sea that is at once real, remembered, and imagined. The title evokes the journey to the coast, the walk that sets our bodies in motion and, as the atmospheric conditions shift, brings us close to the animals, plants, and minerals that inhabit the landscape we pass through. It calls upon our imagination, allowing us to project our own dreams and memories.

The sea surrounds the exhibition. Or rather, the idea of the sea. For Nishimura, who grew up in Japan where the sea is never far away, it is more than just a subject for representation: it is a presence, a backdrop that is sometimes invisible but whose echo lingers in the memory. For him, the sea evokes a sense of immensity and openness—to possibilities, to myths, to interpretation—which he associates with his painting: across the expanse of the canvas, he builds the image by welcoming the motifs that emerge as he goes along, just as water carries to the surface whatever it finds in its path or brings up from the depths.

The sea is a recurring theme throughout the exhibition. Nishimura brings it into the core of his painting: “My working process, I feel, can be somewhat associated and coincide with the shapes left behind after the waves have receded on the beach, or the seawater seeping into the sand.”1 His technique varies depending on whether he uses oil paint, which takes a long time to dry, or tempera, which has a very short drying time when diluted with water, allowing him to work with a speed akin to that of drawing. His canvases are made up of superimposed layers of varying degrees of dilution which gradually cover the existing elements as the image emerges. Like receding waves, they leave on the canvas the imprint of what has just departed and now exists in another form, as a palimpsest—behind, beside or beneath. They also give the impression of an image that has been blurred. Like seawater seeping into the sand, Nishimura’s paintings penetrate the fabric of reality, imbued with a damp texture that stirs, hollows out, and smooths over the rough edges, and which, in places, overflows.

It is this materiality—composed of overflows, of fullness, and emptiness—that we encounter upon entering the exhibition with factory (2018), the first work on display. An industrial seascape, it introduces both the journey promised by Towards a Sea and Nishimura’s pictorial work and his relationship with the landscape. A black horizontal line runs through the centre of the work: a structure on stilts that delineates, in the foreground, a stretch of water seen from a beach or a grey parapet, and, in the background, green mountains surrounding distant buildings. The largest is particularly intriguing due to its flattened dome-like shape. Moreover, the mountain spills over onto it. The layers of green paint that make up the mountainous landscape and the sky are applied with varying degrees of dilution to convey the depth of space. They sometimes reveal pale, almost ghostly forms—blurred yet still visible. The layers of colour can be perceived not only through their variations in transparency but also through streaks of drips. These convey both the sensation that the paint— and therefore the landscape—is wet and that Nishimura is inserting himself into the scene, marking his presence with brushstrokes that are less uniform than those in the lower part of the painting. In the centre, a marked brushstroke creates the impression of a work still in the making, open to possibilities and interpretation. While the scene appears to have been captured on the fly from the window of a moving vehicle, on closer inspection, is it not the landscape itself, in its entirety, that is in motion, that is stirred?

A breath of life surfaces on Nishimura’s canvases, making the whole landscape come alive. In the case of summer clouds (2024), it is an overflowing of the sky that gives the canvas its full power. Surprising and surreal, this overflow conveys the sky’s irrepressible momentum but, above all, transforms it into an active force: the sky appears to advance towards the house, towards the lower part of the painting, towards the foreground. A photograph from the Taishō era (1912–1926) served as the inspiration for this work, however, by inserting this blue trace, Nishimura revisits and reinterprets the photographed landscape: without this shift of the sky, attention would have remained focused on the white house, with the sky in the background. Here, it is the sky that shapes the white clouds; indeed, it acts upon the landscape and the viewer. The blue streak also draws attention to the white gaps left in the landscape, which imbue summer clouds with a sense of movement. Like the silences in a musical score, the white spaces that punctuate the work make the colours and the breathing of the landscape all the more resonant.

In Towards a Sea, the landscape is charged with emotion because of its close connection with living beings. [...] Beyond the individual works themselves, a mental landscape takes shape as one wanders through the exhibition galleries, conceived as a series of visual echoes. For Nishimura, the spaces between the works are also of great importance to the narrative, as they give it its rhythm. The exhibition thus focuses on the visible and invisible connections that exist between things and beings, and on the way in which the images evoke our own memories and experiences. With Towards a Sea, Nishimura asks how we fit into the landscape, and how the landscape becomes part of us. [...]

The exhibition Towards a Sea can be seen as a dreamlike space in which the sea, suspended between surface and depth, acts as a threshold. It might be a day’s walk, a journey through landscapes whose light shifts as the day progresses, drawing us closer to the sea, allowing us to touch its water, dive into its depths, and then leave it behind. It might be a quest, a lifelong journey—that uninterrupted movement from birth to death which draws us closer to, and then distances us from, the places and people who populate our daily lives or whom we encounter, if only briefly. Towards a Sea may also be a resistance to oblivion: just as memory permeates our present experience, the canvases bear traces of a past even as they open themselves up to our own memory, our experience, and our imagination.

Elsa Coustou’s full analysis can be found in the exhibition catalog for Yu Nishimura, "Towards a Sea", Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, October 2026.

[1] Nishimura quoted in the press release for his exhibition Ebb tide at Dawid Radziszewski Gallery in Warsaw, Poland (30 September–20 November 2021).

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Elsa Coustou is a curator at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, where she curated solo exhibitions with Yu Nishimura, Meriem Bennani, Mark Leckey, Pol Taburet and Lina Lapelytè. From 2016 to 2021 she worked on the contemporary programme and acquisitions at Tate Britain, London, where she curated and co-curated a number of exhibitions, commissions and collection displays, including solo presentations of Heather Phillipson, Mark Leckey, Mike Nelson and Cerith Wyn Evans. With a focus on emerging British art, she worked on the development of the Art Now series with exhibitions of SERAFINE1369, Jesse Darling, Marguerite Humeau, Simeon Barclay and Rachel Maclean, and co-curated the 2018 Turner Prize. Between 2013 and 2015 she was Assistant Curator at Tate Modern.

Yu Nishimura was born in 1982 in Kanagawa, Japan. His work often draws on the concept of the ‘portrait’, which is not limited to human portraits but also encompasses a quality found in various painted scenes, such as a person walking alone in a forest, animals going about their business, a car speeding by, or elements of the landscape. One of the defining features of his paintings lies in their construction from superimposed layers of pictorial elements, such as the outlines of a figure and swathes of colour, all slightly offset. The image thus becomes fluid and creates an afterimage effect. His recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (FR), Crèvecœur, Paris (FR), David Zwirner, New York (US), Castle, Los Angeles (US), ARCH, Athens (GR), Sadie Coles HQ, London (UK), La Società Delle Api, Monaco (MC), the Kanazawa 21st Century Museum, Ishikawa (JP), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan (KR).

This publication reflects the views and opinions of the individual authors. As a platform dedicated to the sharing of information and ideas, our objective is to highlight a diversity of perspectives. Accordingly, the opinions expressed herein should not be interpreted as those of the Fondation France-Asie or its affiliates.