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Tokyo Rumando “The Body Lurking Within Color”

Dates: October 2 (Fri) — December 19 (Sat), 2026

Location: Tokyo

Artist Talk with Gallery Director Mark Pearson (Free of charge, no reservations required): October 3 (Sat), 2026 16:00-17:00

Opening Reception: October 3 (Sat), 2026 17:00-19:00

The gallery will be closed from November 1 to November 23.

Zen Foto Gallery is pleased to present ”The Body Lurking Within Color,” a solo exhibition by photographer Tokyo Rumando, from Friday, October 2 through Saturday, October 31, and again from Tuesday, November 24 through Saturday, December 19, 2026.
Marking Tokyo Rumando’s first solo exhibition at Zen Foto Gallery in five years, the exhibition celebrates the publication of her 2024 photobook ‘Paris Iridescent’, published by Zen Foto Gallery. The exhibition will feature nine carefully selected works presented as large-format prints on Japanese washi paper.
On Saturday, October 3, Zen Foto Gallery director Mark Pearson will be in conversation with Tokyo Rumando for an artist talk event. We warmly invite you to join us.

This work is a refined photographic interpretation of my own performance, originally presented in November 2018 at Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière as a satellite event of ‘disco red dress’, which was exhibited by Taka Ishii Gallery at Paris Photo.
The performance was later developed into the video work ‘The Story of S’, presented as a solo exhibition at Museum Folkwang, Germany in 2020, and as ‘S TRIP’ at Zen Foto Gallery in 2021. In 2024, the work was also published by the same gallery under the title ‘Paris Iridescent’.

For my 2026 solo exhibition, I have chosen the title ‘The Body Lurking Within Color’.
The exhibition explores color as a spatial environment and examines how I confront and resonate with the boundary between fields of color and my own body. By shifting the focus away from the body as an object, I seek to reveal what can emerge through this displacement and to produce a visual transformation. The compositions of color assert a powerful and definite presence.
I consider lurking and camouflage not simply as acts of hiding, but as positive actions—strategies for navigating and surviving within a contemporary society characterized by constant and rapid change.
In the space between these seemingly contradictory states of “definite presence” and “lurking,” time and memory, emotions and thoughts, and the choices I have made continue to circulate.
When lines and spaces are expressed through layers of accumulated hues, I believe it becomes possible to construct a temporary heterotopia—one in which I can free myself from fixed images of the body and from the constraints of how the self is expected to be. It is a space in which a new relationship with color can begin.

— Tokyo Rumando

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Artist Profile

Tokyo Rumando

Tokyo Rumando was born in 1980 in Tokyo. She graduated from Bunka Fashion College and is currently studying art research and oil painting at Musashino Art University. A self-taught photographer, she began taking photographs in 2005 and primarily focuses on self-portraits. Most of her staged photographs feature herself and explore questions of identity. Her practice also encompasses performance and various media, through which she examines her own identity and artistic expression.

Active in Japan and internationally, her series Orphée was included in the group exhibition Performing for the Camera at Tate Modern (London) in 2016. Her solo exhibition The Story of S was held at Museum Folkwang (Essen, Germany) in 2020, and her series Rest 3000~ Stay 5000~ was included in the group exhibition Tokyo: Art & Photography at the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford) in 2021.

Her solo exhibitions include I'm only happy when I'm naked (Ibasho Gallery, Antwerp, 2018; Taka Ishii Gallery Photography Paris, 2016); S (Zen Foto Gallery, 2018); Orphée (Tokyo Light Room, Place M, and Zen Foto Gallery, Tokyo, 2014); REST 3000~ STAY 5000~ (Zen Foto Gallery, 2012); and Hotel Life (Place M, Tokyo, 2012).

Her photobooks include Paris Iridescent (2024), S (2018), selfpolaroids (2017), Orphée (2014), and Rest 3000~ Stay 5000~ (2012), all published by Zen Foto Gallery.

Publications & Prints