若松琉夏 | Runa Wakamatsu
飛んでゆきたい

MEDEL GALLERY SHU is pleased to present Ruka Wakamatsu’s solo exhibition, “I Want to Fly Away,” from November 21 to December 3, 2025.

Ruka Wakamatsu, a rising artist who graduated from the Department of Oil Painting at the Tokyo University of the Arts in 2025, explores the delicate and ever-shifting boundaries between two-dimensional characters and the real world. Her practice employs experimental approaches that engage with the material qualities of her medium, inviting viewers to experience the subtle interplay between the tangible and the imagined.

Since childhood, Wakamatsu has been drawn to manga and anime characters—figures with whom she could empathize more deeply than with real people. This emotional connection manifests naturally in her paintings, where these characters emerge as reflections of both her personal imagination and broader contemporary concerns. Within them, one can glimpse the uncertainties of the modern world: fluctuating identities, the fragility of self-perception, and the desire to find emotional grounding in a landscape of constant change.

Wakamatsu’s use of diverse materials—whether pigments, textures, or layers of transparency—creates a painterly language that blurs the boundary between reality and fiction. The results are works that seem to hover between worlds, evoking the sensation of floating in a dreamlike space. Through this visual oscillation, she translates the act of “painting” into a form of exploration—a means of navigating and visualizing the unseen emotional states that exist between freedom and limitation, fantasy and reality.

Central to Wakamatsu’s artistic process is the act of painting itself—a deliberate and physical gesture through which she negotiates meaning and presence. Yet her works extend beyond the conventional framework of painting, venturing into new realms of expression that merge imagination, perception, and memory. Her canvases breathe with a sense of weightlessness, echoing the moment when the familiar becomes strange and the ordinary becomes transcendent.

This summer, I went to an amusement park and rode a roller coaster.

A roller coaster, with its secure safety bar, centrifugal turns, and dizzying drops, might seem terrifying to some. Yet for me, the best part is that fleeting instant when I feel as though I’m gently thrown into the sky—weightless, suspended, and free. The thrill, the wind on my face, the view that opens up between the loops—all of it is undeniably physical and constrained, yet within that restriction lies a peculiar sense of freedom. There is comfort in surrendering to that controlled intensity, to that narrow but exhilarating space of unbounded feeling.

At the same time, I long to fly for real.
To soar through the vast open sky with nothing to restrain me—to go wherever I wish, to see whoever I want, in a single bound. I imagine how liberating it would be to float endlessly, untethered, through the air. When I ride a roller coaster, I begin to dream that maybe such freedom is possible.

I have always been captivated by this paradoxical feeling—the yearning for an unattainable kind of freedom, and the strange reassurance found in the impossibility of achieving it. It is a contradiction that quietly exists within everyday life, and it is this duality that inspired my latest works.

— Ruka Wakamatsu

Through her paintings, Wakamatsu invites us to step into this delicate space between desire and reality—where gravity and imagination coexist. Her work captures that instant of suspension, both emotional and physical, when one is caught between fear and exhilaration, freedom and restraint. “I Want to Fly Away” becomes, in this sense, both a longing and a confession—a visual meditation on the tension between the urge to escape and the comfort of remaining grounded.