Ayaka Terajima: Spacey Clay is on view at nouveaux deuxdeux, Munich
July 4 – September 6, 2025
Ayaka Terajima’s new sculptures and works on paper, presented in the solo exhibition “Spacey Clay” at Galerie nouveaux deuxdeux, articulate an intricate dialogue between spiritual symbolism, mythological archetypes, and a critical examination of contemporary consumer culture. Her practice weaves abstraction and figuration, infusing vibrant chromatic sensibilities through the incorporation of supermarket advertising, which adds a new layer of conceptual consideration to her works of paper for the first time. Her use of disposable packaging materials continues as part of her sculptural practice to create texture and structure. These commercial aesthetics are not merely formal strategies but serve as conceptual conduits—linking questions of consumption, disposability, and ecological precarity to broader inquiries into identity, transformation, and the sacred.
At the core of Terajima’s artistic inquiry lies an evolving narrative inhabited by figures that also serve as vessels—entities that hover between temporalities and ontologies: simultaneously ancient and futuristic, spiritual and industrial. This ambivalence is central to Terajima’s exploration of materiality and metamorphosis. In her current investigations, she deepens this trajectory by considering “the relationship between the Moon and us,” invoking cosmological frameworks that bridge the corporeal with the metaphysical.
Historically venerated as a symbol of regeneration and cyclical renewal, the Moon anchors Terajima’s engagement with bodily rhythms and cosmic order. Her invocation of the Greek physician Hippocrates, who cautioned against surgical procedures on lunar-correlated body parts during specific lunar phases, underscores a long-standing belief in the Moon’s physiological and spiritual influence. This multidimensional approach allows Terajima to collapse distinctions between ancient cosmology and contemporary subjectivity, aligning bodily cycles with celestial mechanics.
Integral to this conceptual framework are the Doki figures, elaborately ornamented and unglazed ceramics inspired by Japan’s Jōmon period. Terajima draws upon these ancestral forms to create ceramic works that merge historical craftsmanship with contemporary sensibilities and artistic considerations that represent her cultural context. Her use of molds derived from mass-produced food packaging materials inflicts the work with an irony that simultaneously critiques and reclaims the logics of consumption. Despite their industrial references, the sculptures retain a handmade tactility, emphasizing a material intimacy that resists total commodification.
Terajima’s visual lexicon draws from a wide range of disciplines—archaeology, physics, folklore, anthropology, and astronomy—to construct a symbolic language that references deities, yōkai (Japanese supernatural entities), and mythic animals. These figures are sites of tension: between the synthetic and the organic, the sacred and the disposable. Motifs borrowed from industrial food culture—such as textures suggestive of confections and snack packaging—become metaphors for spiritual and material ingestion. The consumption of goods becomes analogous to the consumption of identities and desires, implicating the body as both medium and site of transformation.
In this cosmology, the body emerges as a vessel—porous, mutable, and symbolically charged. The apertures in Terajima’s sculptural forms gesture toward possibilities. What lies within? Memory? Essence? A latent spirituality? These figures negotiate containment and permeability, invoking themes of visibility, reciprocity, and recognition: “I looked up and she looked at me.” This moment of mutual gaze encapsulates a poetics of interconnectedness—both divine and deeply human. Anatomical elements such as legs, feet, and incised glyphs root these forms within the material world, aligning physical embodiment with celestial rhythm.
Ultimately, the Moon functions not merely as a motif but as a metaphor for cyclical rebirth—a celestial force shaping tides, fertility, emotion, and spiritual renewal. For Terajima, it signifies a continuum linking myth and material, past and present, ritual and repetition. Through this lens, Terajima constructs a contemporary mythology—a vision of spiritual regeneration and ecological consciousness rendered through the interwoven languages of consumer culture, artisanal craft, and the cosmos. Her work proposes not a return to origins, but a reimagining of material existence as an ongoing, sacred negotiation between the industrial and the infinite.
Text by Heike Dempster
Contact
contact@deuxdeux.de
nouveaux deuxdeux
Amalienstr. 22
80333 München
Germany
Photos courtesy of nouveaux deuxdeux
