About this Event
As part of the group exhibition AWAI, opening October 23, 2025, SEIZAN Gallery invites you to a conversation with the three exhibiting artists—Marina Berio, Aya Fujioka, and Asa Hiramatsu—moderated by Pauline Vermare of the Brooklyn Museum.
Derived from classical Japanese, Awai refers to an in-between realm or liminal space where two entities meet, overlap, or interact. It evokes the subtle threshold between dualities—light and shadow, self and other, reality and dream. In this discussion, the artists will reflect on how their distinct practices embody and explore the delicate and multifaceted notion of Awai.
Marina Berio (b. 1966, Boston, MA) is an interdisciplinary artist whose charcoal drawings reinterpret the photographic negative as a poetic space of loss, doubt, and transformation. Created between 2007 and 2012, these works invert light and shadow—sunlit fields appear as voids, and studio lamps as celestial forms—evoking the tension between presence and absence. Additionally, Berio presents three new works from her ongoing series of gum bichromate prints, a 19th-century photographic process that uses light-sensitive dichromates instead of silver halides. Using unconventional pigments such as her own blood, she transforms family photographs into intimate, visceral meditations that merge the body with memory and image. Berio earned her MFA in Photography from Bard College and has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Pollock/Krasner Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Galerie Miranda (Paris), Galería Phuyu (Buenos Aires), Michael Steinberg Fine Art (New York), and in a major survey at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
Aya Fujioka (b. 1972, Hiroshima, Japan) presents selected works from LIFE STUDIES, a recently published series from AKAAKA in Kyoto based on photographs she took in New York from the late 2000s to the 2010s. Influenced by the street-photography tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Fujioka captures fleeting moments of urban life that hover between the ordinary and the uncanny, the intimate and the anonymous. Taken during her years in New York as an emerging photographer, these images trace a personal yet universal search for presence and belonging. Fujioka studied photography at Nihon University College of Art and lived in New York from 2007 to 2013 through a fellowship from Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs. Her photobook Here Goes River (AKAAKA, 2017) received the Kimura Ihei Award, and her work has been exhibited widely, including at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and the Irie Taikichi Memorial Museum of Photography, Nara. Her work is in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She lives and works in Kyoto.
Asa Hiramatsu (b. 1982, Tokyo, Japan) is a self-taught painter presenting six new canvases in her U.S. debut. Working primarily with a palette knife or her hands, she creates textured, muted surfaces that evoke quiet introspection. Her imagery—simple objects and abstract forms suspended in dreamlike color fields—emerges from visceral necessity rather than formal lineage. “These are images I’ve been holding inside my body since childhood,” she explains. Recurring motifs such as clouds and seesaws reflect her poetic sensibility and fascination with balance, weight, and the space between reality and imagination. Hiramatsu studied Linguistics at the University of the Sacred Heart, Tokyo, and her multidisciplinary practice spans oil painting, collage, illustration, and kamishibai. Her work has been exhibited at 104 GALERIE and LOKO Gallery (Tokyo), and she recently completed a residency at photographer Saul Leiter’s New York studio, contributing to Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective (Thames & Hudson, 2024).
Pauline Vermare (b. 1978, France) is a photography historian and curator. Raised partly in Tokyo, she later studied Japanese at INALCO in Paris. Vermare has held curatorial positions at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson (Paris), The Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, and Magnum Photos (New York). She is currently the Philip and Edith Leonian Curator of Photography at the Brooklyn Museum. A board member of the Saul Leiter Foundation, she co-curated All About Saul Leiter: A Retrospective (Bunkamura, 2017). Her long-term research on photographer Akihiko Okamura culminated in The Memories of Others (Atelier EXB / Prestel), and she recently co-edited I’m So Happy You Are Here (Aperture / Textuel), a survey of Japanese women photographers from the 1950s to the present, and co-curated its accompanying traveling exhibition. She is based in Brooklyn, New York.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
SEIZAN Gallery New York, West 26th Street, New York, NY, USA, United States
USD 0.00
