September 26 – October 1, 2026/ Three Space Tokyo

Birthday Stories was an interdisciplinary exhibition featuring a series of paintings and installations that explore time, memory, and the rituals of everyday life.

Taking its title from Haruki Murakami’s short story collection, the exhibition considers birthdays not as mere annual celebrations, but as quiet encounters with time. Time does not pass once a year; it moves every second. Birthdays offer a moment to pause and notice who we have been, who we are, and whom we are becoming.

Through recurring visual motifs, atmospheric spatial installations, and textured paintings, the work returns to the gestures we inherit and the ways we care for ourselves and others: decorating cakes, wrapping gifts, lighting candles, and posing for photographs. We remember not all at once, but through fragments of light, texture, scent, and rhythm, where imagination quietly fills what is missing.

None of these rituals can stop time, nor were they ever meant to. They are simply a way of making things beautiful despite their impermanence; a quiet, deliberate way of saying yes to a life we know is fragile.

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