MEDEL GALLERY SHU HIBIYA is pleased to present Uncontrolled Diorama, a solo exhibition by Chaen Hayate, on view from July 24 through August 4, 2026.

Through sculpture and installation, Chaen Hayate explores not objects themselves, but the conditions that allow objects to emerge into perception. The forms and relationships arranged within the exhibition space continually shift in meaning according to the viewer’s gaze and movement. Although physically static, the works generate a profound sense of movement through the act of seeing itself.

This exhibition presents a fundamental question: How do landscapes and objects come to be perceived, and how are they constructed within our consciousness? Rather than presenting a finished image, Uncontrolled Diorama invites viewers to experience the very moment in which an image comes into being. It is this unfolding process of perception that lies at the heart of the exhibition.

My practice centers on installation. What I create is not the object itself, but the conditions that allow an object to begin moving.

Like a stationary car within a diorama that somehow suggests the possibility of motion, I arrange relationships within space so that movement emerges through the act of seeing. My works are not fixed images, but dynamic fields generated through the continual movement of perception.

Shitsurae—the Japanese concept of spatial arrangement—is the act of establishing the conditions through which space becomes recognizable as a landscape. The world we encounter is originally continuous and undivided, where objects and backgrounds, places and things, have not yet been separated. Landscape emerges only when relationships such as object and background, form and meaning, begin to take shape.

Yet a landscape is never a completed image. It is a temporary order that is continually generated as perception moves back and forth between object and relationship, between part and whole. A landscape is therefore both a spatial structure and a temporal rhythm created through bodily movement. What viewers experience is not simply the object itself, but the network of relationships that makes the object possible. Through this continual exchange, space itself becomes organized. The true subject of my work is not form, but the conditions that give rise to form.

Rather than presenting a finished image, this exhibition reveals the moments before and after a landscape comes into existence—where structure and image, space and time, coexist simultaneously. Landscape appears not as something fixed, but as a dynamic rhythm in which relationships are continually generated, reorganized, and regenerated.

I do not create objects. I create the conditions from which landscapes emerge. My work is a place where perception continues to build relationships within those conditions.

— Chaen Hayate

We often take the act of “seeing” a work of art or a landscape for granted. This exhibition quietly invites us to reconsider that assumption.

As viewers move through the space, their shifting gaze and physical movement continually reshape the landscape before them. Through this accumulation of perceptual experiences, the exhibition itself remains in a constant state of transformation.

Rather than presenting a completed sculptural form, Chaen Hayate offers an experience in which the act of seeing becomes the artwork itself. Each visitor’s unique perception completes the exhibition, making every encounter a singular and evolving experience.