biscuit gallery underflow
Karuizawa News
Suyeont × Haruka Takahashi, “underflow”
biscuit gallery Over/Under Karuizawa Residency / Opening Exhibition
underflow
Suyeont × Haruka Takahashi
2026.10.24 (Sat) – 12.26 (Sat)
OPENING RECEPTION
2026.10.24 (Sat) 12:00 −
Both artists Suyeont & Haruka Takahashi in attendance
biscuit gallery is opening a new space, biscuit gallery Over/Under Karuizawa Residency, on Tennis Court Street in Kyu-Karuizawa, in the town of Karuizawa, Nagano. With an exhibition room on the ground floor and an artist-in-residence facility above, it is run as a base that supports artists making work and exhibitions during their stay in the natural setting of Karuizawa.
The inaugural exhibition is “underflow”, bringing together the Korean artist Suyeont and the Japanese artist Haruka Takahashi. The exhibition runs from Saturday 24 October 2026 to Saturday 26 December 2026. Over/Under builds its programme around collaborations between artists from abroad and artists based in Japan, together with solo exhibitions by artists connected to the gallery. Distinct from our Shinjuku, Tokyo space, and taking time not bound by any pace, it aims to nurture artists’ exhibitions and international dialogue. This exhibition is its first step.
About the Exhibition “underflow”
One account of the place name “Karuizawa” traces it to a word meaning a dried-up mountain stream. Yet it is only the surface that has run dry: water still flows underground, and in many places it comes back into view after only a little rain. The same is true of Shiraito Falls, one of the area’s best-known sights. The falls are not the continuation of a river. They are snow that fell on Mount Asama, travelled underground over many years, and now wells up and pours out from the boundary between a stratum of rock and a layer of pumice. The practices of the two artists in this exhibition, Suyeont and Haruka Takahashi, can be described in much the same terms as this land.
Suyeont works on supports such as two layers of thin cotton cloth, or sheets of graph paper you can see straight through. Her works hold an image that is grasped at a single glance together with a transparency born of the fragility of the support, and a depth that seems to draw the viewer in. The same is true of her installations using fabric. Because what lies beyond shows through, outlines come undone and the image never settles into a fixed form. She holds the small warmth and texture of daily life on the picture plane while showing, at the same time, that it is something already in transit.
Haruka Takahashi, by contrast, layers persimmon tannin over oil paint and pastel and assembles wooden parts, building the support itself. The painting does not stay flat: it takes on thickness and unevenness and rises off the wall. The cross-section of those stacked materials echoes the making of this land, where strata and pumice lie one on top of the other. What Takahashi looks at is the sense of presence a person carries. The culvert — a river covered over and no longer visible from the surface — is the metaphor she has chosen in her recent work. Rather than forcing the invisible into view, she tries to hold the sensations she carries inside herself, and their wavering, as the touch of material, like water that keeps flowing even after it has been covered over.
“underflow” is a two-person exhibition by these two artists.
Underflow is a word for water flowing beneath the surface of the ground. It is also used in computing, where it names the phenomenon of a value too small to fit the available digits being handled as zero. Suyeont makes her support translucent; Takahashi gives hers thickness. Their hands move in opposite directions, and yet what the two are reaching for is the same: something that stays unseen and is nevertheless certainly there. This exhibition is an invitation to encounter those two approaches.
Two Dianthus, 2026
acrylic on cotton
33.4 × 45.5 cm
“sasamorpha borealis,” 2026
beeswax, cotton sheeting, persimmon tannin, wood
147 × 110 × 38 mm
Artists
Suyeont
Suyeont
Born in Busan, Korea, in 1988. BFA in Film, Korea National University of Arts, 2015; MFA in Fine Arts, Korea National University of Arts, 2020.
I seek to reveal the transience of life and the events that occur within it. Moving between drawings on graph paper, paintings, and works using fabric, I inscribe the precious sensations I wish to preserve onto thin supports. The essence of existence, where “impermanence” and “meaning” coexist, constantly bewilders me. Through my work, I wish to express a state where that which is nothing yet everything, that which is momentary yet eternal, that which fades away yet is stunningly beautiful, collide with one another.
Haruka Takahashi
Haruka Takahashi
Born in Kushiro, Hokkaido, in 1994. Graduated from the Oil Painting Course, Tama Art University, in 2018. Lives and works in Tokyo. Recent solo exhibitions include “A White Culvert” (hide gallery, Tokyo, 2026).
Taking the sense of presence that a person carries as my theme, I work through the relationship between the flat and the three-dimensional, on states of perception that keep holding together while remaining contradictory and on the wavering and the questions that arise in between. To become invisible is not to disappear. Beneath emotions as ordinary as the soil at the roadside, a white culvert is flowing.
About the Venue
biscuit gallery Over/Under Karuizawa Residency is a two-storey site, with an exhibition room on the ground floor and an artist-in-residence facility above. We run it as a place where a residency leads directly into an exhibition.
The gallery is not open every day during the exhibition. It operates through a combination of irregular open days and private viewings by appointment, and open days are announced on our website as they are set.
INFORMATION
ExhibitionSuyeont × Haruka Takahashi, “underflow”
DatesSaturday 24 October 2026 – Saturday 26 December 2026
Open daysIrregular open days plus private viewings by appointment (details announced on the website)
Hours12:00–17:00 (details announced on the website)
OpeningSaturday 24 October 2026, from 12:00 (both artists Suyeont and Haruka Takahashi in attendance)
Venuebiscuit gallery Over/Under Karuizawa Residency
Address748-2 Kyu-Karuizawa, Karuizawa-machi, Kitasaku-gun, Nagano, Japan
AdmissionFree
Contactinfo@biscuitgallery.com
For Press Enquiries
For coverage of this exhibition or of biscuit gallery Over/Under Karuizawa Residency, and for press images, please contact us at the address below. We also welcome enquiries about artist interviews and photography on site.
biscuit gallery, Press — Kobayashi
info@biscuitgallery.com
biscuit gallery Over/Under Karuizawa Residency ›
Haruka Takahashi — Karuizawa Residency Report ›
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