TAKASE Kanna: Still Soft, Still Sharp
Japanese Artist TAKASE Kanna’s first solo show, Still Soft, Still Sharp, at Hiro Hiro Art Space
TAKASE Kanna: Still Soft, Still Sharp
2026 June 5 — July 11
When TAKASE Kanna’s brush meets a candle on canvas, the flame does not burn quietly. It swells into a tiger’s face, all fury and fangs, heat pressing forward, with a single tear caught at the corner of its eye. On the beach, a claw has traced a heart in the sand while the tide waits at the painting’s edge, unhurried, inevitable, ready to take the heart away and leave only scattered shells. A horse in the sand strains forward and glances back, knowing, perhaps, that no amount of speed outruns the pull of the moon. “Feelings” work the same way: they swell and subside, pressing toward release, or simply wearing themselves smooth. In her Taipei debut, Still Soft, Still Sharp, Japanese artist TAKASE Kanna fills Hiro Hiro Art Space with twenty paintings, opening a habitat for feeling where tigers, horses, bats, and turtles each carry something they can’t quite put down. The exhibition runs June 5 to July 11, 2026.
Takase’s paintings have the warmth of a picture book, until something catches you off guard. In My Pancake, a knife blade holds the reflection of a crying face while blueberries, a glacé cherry, and a fallen stem are nudged into a smile on the pancake’s surface. Humor, unease, and tenderness occupy the same moment without competing, each a different angle on the same feeling. Her practice begins with the everyday: a fleeting impression that lingers just long enough to be written down, then carried from words onto canvas. Emotion comes dressed as something else. It slips instead into the expression of an animal, the lean of a plant, the space between everyday objects, wearing something endearing, something with a face.
Her palette runs rich and bright, and the first impression is almost cheerful. That’s part of it. What stirs beneath the color is harder to name precisely because the surface feels so welcoming. She doesn’t pull back the curtain. She lets the feeling stay half-hidden, just enough to show through, and in that gap, the viewer finds room to bring their own: a particular memory, a specific afternoon, something they never quite managed to say out loud.Still Soft, Still Sharp lives in that tension. Time doesn’t erase; it only softens the outline, the way a reflection in water holds a shape but loses its edge. Still Soft is what has been gradually wrapped in memory and years; Still Sharp is a moment, a word, a specific ache that refuses to dull. The outline may have softened, but the point remains.
TAKASE Kanna
TAKASE Kanna (b. 1994, Osaka) completed her MFA in Painting at Kyoto City University of Arts in 2020 and continues to be based in Kyoto. In 2024, she received the Grand Prize at Kyoto Art for Tomorrow and held a major solo exhibition at The Museum of Kyoto Annex. Her practice begins with writing: noting down the people, moments, and things that catch her attention in daily life, then using those words as the starting point for a painting. Her work takes human relationships as its subject, tracing the feelings that resist articulation in the space between people, including the barriers, frustration, grief, and pain that pass between them, as well as the emotions that stay buried, never quite surfacing, never quite seen. To carry these feelings, TAKASE turns to animals, plants, and everyday objects as stand-ins, translating what is anxious or difficult into imagery that is vivid, playful, and at times almost childlike. The gap between cute and dangerous, between humor and hurt, is where her work lives. Claws and fangs, recurring throughout her paintings, speak to the ways people wound each other; fur that covers the body becomes a metaphor for self-protection. What cannot be said out loud finds its way instead into the expressions and postures of animals, forming a pictorial language that is at once tender and sharp.
Works
CV
1994
Born in Osaka, Japan
2018
BFA Painting, Kyoto City University of Arts, Kyoto
2020
MFA Painting, Kyoto City University of Arts, Kyoto
Awards
2025: Pommery Prize Kyoto 2025 – Grand Prize Winner
2024: Kyoto Art for Tomorrow 2024 Kyoto Prefecture Emerging Artists Selection Exhibition –
Grand Prize Winner
Solo Exhibitions
2026
“Still Soft, Still Sharp” Hiro Hiro Art Space, Taipei
2025
“After the Same Moon” imura art gallery, Kyoto
“Read Your Diary” CADAN Yurakucho, Tokyo
2024
“far yet near, apart yet intertwined” The Museum of Kyoto Annex, Kyoto
“I hear a clumsy whistle” SHUTL, Tokyo
2023
“Sigh at the Stars” imura art gallery, Kyoto
2021
“Walk in a tale” KYOTO OKAZAKI TSUTAYA BOOKS, Kyoto
2020
“Midday leftovers” Gallery Morning, Kyoto
2019
“A story I don’t remember” Gallery of Kyoto City University, Kyoto
Group Exhibitions
2026
“grid5” biscuit gallery, Tokyo
“Un petit peu…encore” DAIMARU, Tokyo
2025
“Pop Bridge: Korea × Japan” Geumsaem Art Museum at Geumjeong Cultural Center, South Korea
“PARTY vol.1” DAIMARU, Tokyo
“ART FAIR TOKYO” Tokyo International Forum, Tokyo
2024
“Emotional Garden” Mozuku Gallery, Taiwan
“HANKYU ART FAIR” Hankyu Umeda, Osaka
“Kyoto Art for Tomorrow 2024” The Museum of Kyoto, Kyoto
“Bottle Mail on the Roadside” Cohju, Kyoto
“ART FAIR TOKYO” Tokyo International Forum, Tokyo
2023
“ART MARKET 2023” DAIKANYAMA TSUTAYA BOOKS, Tokyo
“grid2” biscuit gallery, Tokyo
“(un)fair 2023” SUPERSTUDIO MAXI, Milan, Italy
“Art Collaboration Kyoto” ICC Kyoto, Kyoto
2022
“BEING AND TIME” Powerlong Art Center, Shanghai, China
“Words of Color ―Amane Ishii, Eriko Kubo, Kanna Takase, Sumire Funakoshi―” Shinjuku Takashimaya Art Gallery, Tokyo
“Change/Mind” TENSHADAI, Kyoto
“Shimogyo Machinaka Art Gallery” Kyoto Station, Kyoto
“ART FAIR TOKYO” Tokyo International Forum, Tokyo
“ARTISTS’ FAIR KYOTO 2022” The Museum of Kyoto Annex, Kyoto
2021
“Enclosed mythology” Kanna Takase & Kaori Kurosaki, Artist-in-Residence KAMONASU, Kyoto
“Contemporary Art Fair” Hankyu Umeda, Osaka
“ARTISTS’ FAIR KYOTO 2021” The Museum of Kyoto Annex, Kyoto
2020
“Art Show!” Gallery SHIBATACHO, Osaka
“Tsubo Tsubo Tsubo” Gallery Keifu, Kyoto
2019
“Kyoto Art Lounge” Starbucks Coffee Kyoto Sanjo Ohashi, Kyoto
“From the Youth” Gallery of the Youth Senbon Kitaoji, Kyoto
Press