Open form – Thinking through drawing

Naruto University of Education, Japan
12 - 22. 1. 2026

Performers: Mayumi Abe, Moe Iezaki, Yukako Irimura, Kaori Kahama, Miyu Kotoku, Yuya Matsuo, Noriko Nagatomo, Yuriko Yanagi, Kentaro Suzuki and Miwa Furuie
Curator: Associate Professor Lenka Sýkorová, Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art, University of West Bohemia in Pilsen
Art conception: Dr. Jan Pfeiffer, Faculty of Education, Department of Art Education, Charles University, Prague
Collaboration: Dr. Moe Iezaki, Naruto University of Education

The exhibition builds upon a three-day workshop conceived as an open field for experimentation, in which participants gradually moved beyond conventional creative rules and entered an open form grounded in sensitive spatial perception, imagination, performativity, and collective attunement.

At the outset, the participants collaboratively created a scenographic environment—an activated “game field” that became the foundation for further exploration. Working with found materials, modeling clay, and their own bodies in space enabled the emergence of embodied drawing, walking as a performative act, and direct interaction between the individual and the collective. The process was not oriented toward a final outcome, but toward the present moment, in which meaning arises through bodily experience and shared movement.

Japan functions here as a symbolic “geographical game board”—a mutable territory that, through play, becomes a laboratory landscape. Within this landscape, relationships between the local and the global, the individual and the collective, the material and the imaginary are examined. Japanese identity does not appear as a theme of representation, but rather as an attitude: humility, respect, sensitivity to emptiness, balance, and the continual negotiation of opposites—black and white, movement and stillness, action and listening—in the spirit of the yin–yang principle.

The outcomes of the workshop include a collective object, a video performance, and an individual work by the artist Jan Pfeiffer. All of these layers are connected by open form—openness, incompleteness, and an emphasis on process. Interpretation is not fixed but emerges through walking, repetition, embodied experience, and the continuous re-tuning of relationships within space.

Participant feedback revealed that the dominant emotion was joy in creation and a sense of freedom. The exhibition thus does not present a closed whole, but rather an invitation to enter the process, engage in personal interpretation, and perceive the balance between experimentation, humility, and shared creative being.

Lenka Sýkorová