CARA’s fall 2025 exhibition, E’wao Kagoshima: Animated Minds, is thefirst retrospective of the Japanese-born, New York-based artist E’wao Kagoshima. Tracing his practice from the 1960s to the present, the exhibition presents Kagoshima’s inventive and skillful ensemble-making, bringing together two-dimensional works that he describes as shinshō (心象), or “forms in the mind.” Emerging from the artist’s imagined, mental landscapes, these “forms” consider everyday life without preconceptions. Guided by an attitude of openness and eagerness, Kagoshima gives shape to things that were not previously visible but insist on being seen.

Born in Niigata, Japan, in 1945 and raised in Tokyo, E’wao Kagoshima spent his early years pursuing the study of metal craft at the suggestion of his uncle, a distinguished lacquer practitioner who discouraged him from becoming an artist. In 1976, he moved to New York City, immersing himself in the city’s avant-garde artist scenes over the following decades. With strong drawing skills, a keen sense of color, and a distinct graphic sensibility, Kagoshima is a maximalist, frequently breaching the boundaries of mediums while indiscriminately moving between figuration and abstraction. He plays with mischief, wit, and humor to attend to quotidian observations, and imagines erotic, macabre, and dreamlike worlds of reflection and escape.

This exhibition takes the artist’s 1983 presentation at the New Museum as a key point of departure. Organized as a single-room display alongside that of two other artists, the exhibition provided space for Kagoshima to experiment fully across mediums and modes of installation: He packed his room with lively canvases, large-scale works on brown packaging paper, ballpoint pen caricatures, and improvisational assemblages. Underscoring his eclecticism and meticulous handiwork, Animated Minds revisits works included in that earlier exhibition, alongside a number of newly uncovered pieces, and traces the artist’s practice through the present day. It is the culmination of a multiyear research and conservation effort supported by CARA’s Fellowship Program.

Across five decades of art-making, Kagoshima has continued to experiment and innovate without privileging any particular medium over another. Blurring boundaries, his works deftly amalgamate vivid and bizarre scenes with everyday detritus from life in New York, such as cigarettes, coins, and food wrappers. The works assembled in Animated Minds articulate Kagoshima’s interest in both playful representation and quiet reflection, impulses that are enhanced by his subconscious visualizations and satirical responses to contemporary modes of living. His compositions move between elaborate visions and uncanny juxtapositions, bringing his command of form and color to life.

E’wao Kagoshima: Animated Minds is co-curated by Rahul Gudipudi and Reiko Tomii. Archival assistance by Naomi Nakazato.

Generous support for E’wao Kagoshima: Animated Minds is provided by Jane DeBevoise.