Gallery Seek at Affordable Art Fair Hong Kong 2026 — Four Japanese Artists at Booth F02

From Thursday, May 14 through Sunday, May 17, 2026, Gallery Seek (Caretta Shiodome, Tokyo) will exhibit at Affordable Art Fair Hong Kong 2026, one of Asia's largest art fairs, held at the Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre (HKCEC). Our booth number is F02.

The Affordable Art Fair is an international touring fair bringing together contemporary art from around the world in the HKD 1,000–100,000 price range. Its Hong Kong edition, with more than 105 galleries and over 800 participating artists, is known as one of Hong Kong's largest art markets.

This time, Gallery Seek is bringing four artists who each embody the “now” of Japan: Takeshi Harada in metalwork, Kenji Shimizu in painting, Mio Okazaki in Cubist painting, and Ayaka Umeda in wax-resist dyeing — each connecting Japanese tradition to the contemporary moment in a distinct way.

【Featured Artists】

▶ Takeshi Harada (Metalwork / 14 works)
Born in Aichi Prefecture in 1984. Completed graduate studies in metal sculpture at Hiroshima City University's Graduate School of Arts. Winner of the Grand Prix at the Tokyo Midtown Award 2014 art competition. Harada freely commands copper, brass, silver, lacquer, and colored foil through the three traditional metalwork techniques — forging, engraving, and casting — to reconstruct in metal “memories of watching plants and animals with childhood wonder in nature.” He uses no paint whatsoever; every color is produced through the metal's own chemical reactions (potassium sulfide coloring, flame oxidation) or through alloying. Representative works include “Trace” (2024, HKD 42,842), “Spring -Dandelion and Japanese Five-lined Skink Three-legged Incense Burner-” (2025, HKD 26,053), and “Summer Night” and “Late Summer” (2025, HKD 18,526 each). At first glance they read as sculpture, but lift the lid and incense can actually be burned inside — a playful sense of “beauty in use” that runs through Harada's work.

▶ Kenji Shimizu (Painting / 5 works)
Born in Nagoya in 1971. Graduated in oil painting from Tama Art University; completed graduate studies in design (Chinami Nakajima Laboratory) at Tokyo University of the Arts. Shimizu is a painter who reinterprets classical images from Japanese art history — Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, Jākyū's Colorful Realm of Living Beings, the Scrolls of Frolicking Animals — casting his original character “Bridolly” as the protagonist. Bridolly began life as an old tin bird toy: unable to fly, yet still jumping until its spring rusts through — a character embodying “nobility within limitation” — and appears transformed into a phoenix, a three-legged crow, or a dragon. Representative works include “BRIDOLLY-Phoenix-” (2024, 10F, HKD 55,579), “Sun and Blue Dragon” (2023, 10M, HKD 46,316), and “Ryukin and BRIDOLLY” (2022, 6F, HKD 27,789).

▶ Mio Okazaki (Cubist Painting / 14 works)
Born in Sapporo in 1995. Graduated from the Department of Visual Communication Design, Musashino Art University. After working as a reporter for Weekly Pro-Wrestling at Baseball Magazine Co., she turned to painting full-time. Okazaki takes moves from professional wrestling and martial arts as her subject, using Cubist technique to unify the perspectives of spectators seated all around a 360-degree ring into a single picture plane — connecting the method Picasso and Braque established a century ago to the structural inevitability of ring sports. She won both the Kenta Nakajima Award and the Liquitex Award at the first ARTIST NEW GATE. Painter Kenta Nakajima has called her “a talent that appears once in fifty years.” Representative works include “TOPE SUICIDA” (2024, 30S, HKD 44,579), “ROMERO_SPECIAL” (2023, 30S, HKD 44,579), “ANTONIO INOKI ENZUIGIRI” (2024, S20, HKD 31,842 — a collaboration honoring the late Antonio Inoki), and “CUBIST JAZZ HARMONY” (2024, φ80cm, HKD 28,947). As of 2023 she had a one-year commission waitlist; Hong Kong offers a rare chance to see her work firsthand.

▶ Ayaka Umeda (Rōzome / Wax-Resist Dyeing / 7 works)
Born in Yamagata District, Hiroshima Prefecture in 1993. Completed graduate studies in the Dyeing and Weaving Laboratory at Hiroshima City University's Graduate School of Arts; served as an adjunct assistant professor there (2018–2021). Umeda develops rōzome — an ancient dyeing technique found among the treasures of the Shōsoin Repository — as a form of pictorial expression. Using cloth as her support, she repeats a process of wax-resist, sequential dyeing from pale to dark, and further layers of wax, finally removing the wax, steaming, and fixing the dye to hold multiple layers of color within the cloth itself. She has been selected nine times for the Mitsubishi Corporation Art Gate Program, with all of her submitted works acquired by Mitsubishi Corporation. Her Hong Kong selection centers on the triptych “Dragon Soaring Through Cosmos” -Abyss- / -Vortex- / -Shine- (2024, HKD 14,474 each), alongside “Sparrow Hidden in Flowers” (2023, HKD 11,579), “Blue and Autumn Leaves” (2024, HKD 11,579), and “Sugar Glider” and “Treasure Hunt” (2024, HKD 5,789 each) — seven works in total.

【Dates & Venue】
– Affordable Art Fair Hong Kong 2026
– Private View: Thursday, May 14 – Sunday, May 17, 2026
– Public hours: Fri 15th 12:00–20:00 / Sat 16th 10:00–19:00 / Sun 17th 10:00–19:00
– Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre (HKCEC)
– Gallery Seek Booth F02
– Tickets: https://affordableartfair.com/fairs/hong-kong/

We look forward to seeing you there.