There, All Along : note04 Looking Again
- Jun 3
- 3 min read
Text： Shiho Kanai / Art Director of Gallery Rin
Thank you so much to everyone who visited Anne's exhibition in May.
We are deeply grateful for all the conversations, connections, and moments shared throughout the exhibition.
As we look back on those days, we also find ourselves returning to the works themselves.
This note is an invitation to look again — not for answers, but for the layers that continue to emerge over time.
At first, Anne’s work may appear playful.
Bright colors, childlike figures, strange costumes, exaggerated gestures. The images feel light at a glance, almost familiar, as though they exist somewhere between memory and fiction.
But the longer I spend with the work, the more I begin to feel that multiple images are quietly existing at once.
In ERROR 404: Not Found, a pink animal-like figure sits in a tree above a spiral reflected on the ground below.
At first, the image feels humorous, almost absurd.
And yet, the composition also recalls Enko Sokugetsu-zu — traditional paintings of monkeys reaching for the moon reflected in water, while subtly shifting its meaning into a contemporary context.
In Anne’s version, however, the monkey appears to have become human. Or perhaps it is a human wearing the shape of an animal.
The figure feels suspended somewhere in between.A child, perhaps. Or an adult pretending to be one.
And where the reflected moon might once have appeared, there is only a spiral of dots — unstable, dissolving, almost like an image that can no longer fully load.
The title itself, ERROR 404: Not Found, introduces the language of the internet into the work, connecting older visual traditions with digital absence, disappearance, and disconnection.
At the same time, the costume-like figure can also feel as though it has been made to wear something.
As if identity itself may sometimes become a kind of performance — something shaped, assigned, or carried within society.
The title of another work, Big Sister is Watching You, may immediately bring to mind George Orwell’s "Big Brother is Watching You."
A young girl stares directly outward. At first, the image appears playful, even humorous. But over time, the gaze begins to feel less simple. It becomes unclear who is watching whom.
And when looking more closely, the pose itself begins to resemble gestures associated with Ai Weiwei, a Chinese artist, quietly introducing echoes of questions around authority, identity, and belonging.
Perhaps what lingers beneath the work is not a fixed statement, but a quieter tension around belonging, visibility, and the shapes we learn to inhabit.
What I find compelling in Anne’s work is that these references never fully settle into fixed meanings. Instead, they exist as overlapping layers — sometimes visible, sometimes hidden, sometimes recognized only after spending time with the work.
Japanese art history, internet culture, political imagery, humor, surveillance, childhood, performance — they appear and disappear within the same image.
Sometimes these layers are immediately visible; at other times, they emerge only after spending time with the work.
Anne has shared very little about the personal background, apart from the fact that Anne is currently based in Japan.
Perhaps for that reason, references to Japanese visual culture and the atmosphere surrounding the work invite further speculation. Yet even these readings may be only one layer among many.
Rather than resolving into a single interpretation, these layers remain in conversation with one another. Even without recognizing every reference, something still remains. Perhaps that is what makes the work feel open. The images do not ask to be solved. They ask to be stayed with.
And as viewers spend time with them, different meanings begin to emerge through their own memories, experiences, and ways of seeing. Looking again, the image becomes something else. Another layer emerges.
As curators, we also hope to continue expanding our own readings of the work through conversations with those who encounter it.
Anne Exhibition "There, All Along"
18 May – 29 May 2026
Monday – Friday
12:00 – 16:00
In accordance with the gallery’s hours
Anne Profile
Anne is a visual artist whose work focuses on what existed before labels were attached, on what resonates in the gaps beyond language, and on the quiet gaze of those who stand at the boundary.
Exploring the invisible, the unspoken, and what quietly slips through, Anne’s work brings light to the spaces in between human perception.
By making these gaps the focus, the practice gently unfolds the layered memories that have long been covered.
Website: https://www.anneanne.art/
Instagram @anneanne.art
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