Shaped by impermanence, space, and exchange, Floating Worlds explores the art practices of six artists deeply connected with Japan through lived experience, relationships, and cultural identity.

Their unique and distinctively hybrid bodies of work explore connections, similarities and differences between Japan and New Zealand, generating dialogues about the evolving nature of culture and the environment - extending these conversations beyond our borders into the wider Pacific and across the globe.

Drawing on the concept of the “Floating World” (ukiyo), which emerged during the Edo period (1603–1868) in Japan, the exhibition finds beauty and joy in transience. Just as ukiyo embraced living in the present moment, Floating Worlds highlights impermanence and the ever-changing nature of culture, identity, and the natural world as continually shifting and in flux.

Aiko Robinson draws on the tradition of Japanese shunga (Spring Pictures), which flourished in the Edo period and celebrated sexuality in its many forms. Evoking the ideals of shunga artists, her work explores parallels and contrasts with contemporary ideas about erotica, while highlighting themes of pleasure, intimacy, and humour.

Chris Heaphy emphasises the contingent and unfixed nature of identity, inviting viewers to interpret and reinterpret the work through their own perspectives and experiences. Using symbols, including artifacts, flora, and fauna from Japan and New Zealand, Heaphy generates cross-cultural pictorial narratives in which meanings shift back and forth.

Aaron Scythe’s ceramics reflect a fusion of traditions and cultural influences, inspired by his diverse sense of home. Having lived in Japan for 16 years he has now returned to Aotearoa New Zealand. Scythe’s vessels are a hybrid of place, highlighting how lived experience and cultural exchange shape identity.

“Immersive and suggestive, fluxing and momentary,”¹ Miranda Joseph employs the cherry blossom as a visual and conceptual conduit, evoking the fleeting nature of time and perception. Through light, colour, and form, she captures a moment, rendering the experience of the natural world as both shared and deeply personal.

Extending across five siapo kimono, Yuki Kihara’s サ-モアのうた Song About Samoa – Tūlī’s Flight (2023) depicts the flight of the golden plover above aerial maps of New Zealand, Sāmoa, and Japan. While exploring trans-Pacific social connections, histories, and identity, Kihara positions the Pacific “at the forefront of change and right in the eye of the storm… directly addressing climate mobility, portable sovereignty, and the inequalities of climate change.”²