Kai Matsumiya Fine Arts Gallery

04/30/2026

Timmy Simonds
Teachers Bouquets
May 2nd - June 5th
Opening this Saturday, May 2nd (6-8pm)

Pedagogy is not just a theme in Timmy Simonds’s work. It is almost his medium.

His works treat teaching itself as a material phenomenon, a sound, a choreography, an architecture, a social relation, or, in some cases, a type of broken altruism.

Across the exhibition, materials remain delicate and unstable: water, paper, fabric, collard greens, bleached organic matter, thin ribbons moving with air. These require tending. They wilt, shift, decay, and persist.

The Teachers Bouquet works are arrangements, but also offerings. They collapse organic growth with social ritual, becoming provisional forms that hold care, reward, and loss.

Chains enter elsewhere. Movement becomes structured and cyclical. Actions repeat and accumulate into pattern. What begins as care can become habit. What appears as support can become control.

The work unfolds at the threshold between care and discipline, nurture and domination

02/26/2026

Post fair

opens today featuring Elliott Jamal Robbins
Feb 26-28

02/06/2026

Join us ☀️Tomorrow - Friday, February 6th (6-8pm) for the opening reception of Stephen Felton: Midnight Sun | Sun Worshipper // February 6 – March 15, 2026

Kai Matsumiya presents Midnight Sun | Sun Worshipper, a new body of work by Stephen Felton, created in collaboration with Paul-Aymar Mourgue d’Algue from Truth and Consequences.

The exhibition brings together four large-scale paintings and one smaller work that explore cycles of illumination and obscurity, devotion and excess, endurance and exposure. Programming includes a screening of Jia Zhangke, foregrounding temporal drift and disembodied narration, in which time itself becomes a point of departure within a collapsed present.

That, and a cautious reading group of Emile Cioran’s aphorisms in the Trouble of Being Born, i.e. “ Amid your most intense activities, pause a moment to ‘consider’ your mind’ — this advice is surely not offered to those who ‘consider’ their minds night and day, and who thereby have no need to suspend their activities, for the good reason that they engage in none”, “ In order not to have to resolve them, I have turned all my practical difficulties into theoretical ones. Faced with the Insoluble, I breathe at last . . . “

Learn more at kaimatsumiya.com

11/05/2025

Kai Matsumiya presents the next single-work exhibition by Zoe Pettijohn Schade, featuring the second large completed painting in her ongoing series Attempts at Self Organization (2018–). The single work, which has taken an average of two years with singular dedicated focus, is titled Attempts at Self Organization: The Grand Sorting (2024–25) and follows Attempts at Self Organization: Prevailing Bonds (2023–24).

Schade’s practice explores how individual forms cluster and cohere within self-imposed systems, culminating in Shifting Sets. She works primarily in gouache, a medium with a long history in textile and miniature painting, which she studied during her Fulbright at the Forney Library in Paris. Its matte surface and mutable body lend both precision and openness to the act of painting: it lies perfectly flat yet remains reworkable, allowing color to fade or sharpen, and old pigments to live again in new configurations.

The current series extends from her earlier body of work, Crowds (2013–2018), in which repetition and variation operated as laws governing a collective field. In Crowds, individual elements—shooters, conflict arrows, decapitated kings, vermicular shapes, monkeys—repeated like subjects within a civic order: socially bound by shared structure, yet each with its own degree of freedom, disobedience, or collapse. Points of weakness or variation did not rupture the whole but revealed the unstable gray areas where the rules themselves began to blur.

The second exhibition in this sequence, Attempts at Self Organization: Prevailing Bonds (2022–24), emphasized formations where longer edges joined, producing expansive organic armatures that stretched across the surface, overlapping with other shapes. Some face extinction, others flourish. The first exhibition, The Hard Problem (2018–2022), displayed twenty-six drawings and nine medium paintings—each roughly eighteen by twenty-two inches—that grew increasingly complex and layered, a culmination of four years of focused work.

10/16/2025

Exciting news!

Douglas Rushkoff, author of “Program or Be Programmed” along with many other best selling books, will be joining us at Kai Matsumiya gallery for a talk and conversation about technology, programming, AI, and algorithms. In dialogue with the works on view, he will explore how we might protect, reclaim, and resist in the face of today’s digital onslaught.

This in-person event is presented as a part of Jonathan Bruce Williams’ exhibition “Let’s All Abandon Reality Together” in collaboration with the Department of Transformation at Kai Matsumiya.

Please join us on Tuesday, Oct 21 from 6–8pm at 264 Canal St

About Douglas Rushkoff

Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. His twenty books include the just-published “Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires,” as well as the recent “Team Human,” based on his podcast, and the bestsellers “Present Shock,” “Throwing Rocks and the Google Bus,” “Program or Be Programmed,” “Life Inc,” and “Media Virus.” He also made the PBS Frontline documentaries “Generation Like,” “The Persuaders,” and “Merchants of Cool.” His book “Coercion” won the Marshall McLuhan Award, and the Media Ecology Association honored him with the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

10/10/2025

Kai Matsumiya and Department of Transformation (DT) present Let’s All Abandon Reality Together, the debut solo exhibition of New York–based artist and technologist Jonathan Bruce Williams, on view at 264 Canal street from September 12th through October 25th, 2025.

10/10/2025

02/11/2025

Opening this Friday, Feb 14th ( 6-8 ):

Soda • Chips • Lottery • Cards
Solo exhibition by Nobutaka Aozaki

With wit and humor, Aozaki reimagines urban detritus as cultural capital, exploring how discarded objects acquire new forms of value.
The exhibition showcases Aozaki’s transformation of found ephemera into works that trace human patterns, routines, and rituals.

In Micro Chip Bags, discarded chip bags are microwaved, shrinking and distorting before being treated with formaldehyde, their warped branding and rigid forms blurring the line between waste and art, questioning utility and meaning.

Street Cans features crushed aluminum cans that Aozaki meticulously unfolds, restoring their shape while preserving their history, marking each with the date and location it was found, mapping his chance encounters with strangers.

Similarly, Royal Flush assembles a lost poker hand—each card collected separately—restoring its highest value only once reconstituted. The centerpiece, Lottery Ticket Paintings, repurposes discarded lottery tickets, overlaying them with black paint to conceal branding while preserving the scratch marks left by the original consumers. Arranged based on color, direction, and place of collection, these compositions reflect the fleeting nature of value, the ritual of gambling, and the impermanence of consumer culture.

Through his interventions, Aozaki questions how worth is assigned, exchanged, and transformed, suggesting that value is not fixed but relational—shaped by context, perception, and human interaction.

pictured:

Nobutaka Aozaki
Street Cans
Reconstructed tin cans, 2024
3 x 8 “

Nobutaka Aizaki
Micro chips
Microwaved aluminum chip bags, formaldehyde, 2024
3” x 3”

Nobutaka Aozaki
Lottery Ticket Paintings
Acrylic on lottery tickets, plexiglass
20 “ x 30 “

01/17/2025

Closing tomorrow, Saturday, January 19th.
Craig Kalpakjian
(Pre)History Lessons, or: How [Have] Can People Live Together?

The exhibition combines the concept of a “commonplace book” with the cinematic ability to explore history and complex narratives. Traditionally, commonplace books are personal collections of significant quotes, notes, and ideas meant for reflection. Here, this concept expands into a large-scale wall installation of citations, film excerpts, and images. These references—drawing from The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, as well as works by thinkers like Marshall Sahlins, Pierre Clastres, James C. Scott, and Bertolt Brecht—form a web of interconnected ideas on human societies, social organization, and history.

The installation’s film component anchors these reflections in the present, as the artist documents New York City’s streets from the passenger’s view on various bus routes. Inspired by History Lessons by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, the film lends an anthropological lens, weaving time and motion through the fixed texts to bring historical and philosophical discourse into urban life.

Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything challenges the assumption that the rise of the nation-state was inevitable, instead revealing diverse early social structures where “pre-history” becomes “history.” Their work celebrates humanity’s creativity and adaptability, suggesting that states are just one of many possible social forms—not the inevitable outcome. This perspective encourages us to rethink history and consider new possibilities for organizing society.

Reflecting on these ideas, the installation poses fundamental questions: Why do we think inequality is inevitable? Could humans have chosen differently, and can we still make those choices today? Why do we overlook the political agency and creativity of early people? How can we integrate ancient examples into our society today?

12/04/2024

Our solo presentation with Yasmin Kaytmaz at NADA Miami at booth b212. Come say hi to us!

For the 2024 iteration of NADA Miami, Kai Matsumiya presents a solo presentation by New York-based artist Yasmin Kaytmaz, featuring sculptures that strip away the natural identities of their materials. Lead is rendered benign, an artichoke leaf is transformed into an angel’s feather, and American icons are reduced to their silhouettes, as if victims of obsolescence. The works deny the affirmative, taking familiar aspects of life—particularly Americana—and making them feel more distant and evasive than we are accustomed to.