ExhibitionFriday 27 November 2026
つぐ、つむぐ。- Inherit, Imagine. -
Taihei Soejima and Yoko Imamura
13/14 Cornwall Terrace, Outer Circle (entrance facing Regent's Park), London NW1 4QP
Organised by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation
Kintsugi [mending broken crockery with lacquer and gold], darning. Selection, adaptive re-use.
The spirit of respecting the history of objects while repurposing them for new uses has a long unbroken history in both Britain and Japan. The past is not simply preserved, but transformed so that it connects with the future.
This exhibition introduces two artists who link that spirit with modern-day modes of expression.
Taihei Soejima straddles the apparently conflicting technologies of analogue photography and generative AI, together with painting, to show photography’s function as a recording medium. The concept of authenticity in histories and stories is being undermined by technological developments, and he poses to us the fundamental question of what sort of stories we need for our human existence in the age of the AI boom.
Taking the perspective of a hairdresser who regularly dresses her customers in kimonos, Yoko Imamura sublimates kimonos that can no longer be worn into present-day wearable art. Her works give these kimonos new shapes and functions while respecting their former existence, posing new questions for viewers about tradition, memory, and the value of materials.
In their different ways, they both use the inherited traditions of their medium to show how, with imagination, it can be developed in new directions.
About the Artists
Taihei Soejima
Photography based Artist.
He graduated from the Department of Sculpture, Faculty of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts, and completed his Master of Arts in Global Art Practice (GAP) at the same university. Following his role as an Education & Research Assistant at the university’s Photography Center, he taught at the TUMO Center for Creative Technologies in Armenia. His experiences in Armenia led him to his current artistic theme: “What kind of stories are necessary for humans to be human?” He was based in the UK from 2023 to 2026, working in London as an overseas researcher supported by the Pola Art Foundation in 2024 and the Yoshino Gypsum Art Foundation in 2025. Bridging analogue and digital photography as well as generative AI, his work, which focuses on the relationship between humans and narratives, is exhibited both in Japan and overseas.
Yoko Imamura
Hairdresser and adornment artist.
After graduating from high school she came to the UK to study animal biology. She then changed course and became a hairdresser at the Sanrizz hair salon. After staying here for five years she returned to Japan, gained a national qualification, and won a top ten award at a nationwide competition. She is currently polishing her skills with a view to taking over her mother’s beauty salon, which has been operating for fifty years. Part of her work as a hairdresser is dressing customers in kimono, and through this she became aware that large numbers of kimonos are lying unused, so she launched her project ‘Atelier Yoko’, making use of the respect for history that she found while studying in the UK. Through her ‘wearable art’, which breathes new life into old and now unwearable kimonos, she asserts the colours, feel and comfort of real silk, which is becoming increasingly rare.
‘I want to be one of the threads linking Japan’s traditions to the world, and to the future’.