We are pleased to announce “Good Night My Friends”, Ryosuke KAWAHIRA’s first solo exhibition at gallery UG Osaka Umeda, held from May 15 to June 4, 2024.


Ryosuke KAWAHIRA, who has been one of the gallery’s exclusive artists, was selected from the 2019 UG Project “KONSHIN-TEN”, which is a part of our activities to discover and nurture young artists for around 20 years now.
Recently, he has been making his mark in various places through his remarkable activities, including a solo show at Ginza Tsutaya, a group exhibition in Macau, a solo exhibition at gallery UG Tennoz, and participating in Art Fair Tokyo.

KAWAHIRA transferred the traumas from his imaginative childhood into unique works of art. Using actual briefs as canvas, he depicts the nightmares he had and the ghosts and monsters he imagined.
It seems to be an atonement for the fact that he wet his briefs when he was a child because he could not go to the bathroom in time.

In recent years, he has begun to work more on canvas, and the brief that used to be his material to paint on, has appeared as a hero in his paintings. As his child was born and grew up, the characters overlapped with his own childhood memories and came to be projected more vividly.
At the same time, his work, composed of clear, bold outlines and simple, vividly colored backgrounds, and further comicalized, contains elements of Superflat which has been gaining attention in the contemporary Japanese art scene.


"I wonder where the ghosts and monsters I met in my dreams when I was a child have gone.
As I grew older, my dreams began to become more real, I stopped having nightmares, I don't wear briefs anymore, and I no longer wet the bed.
The battle of bedwetting came to an end, and peace at last...
'Good Night' is a signal for them to fight.
I am sure that in someone's dreams, the bed-wetting battle may still be raging."

Ryosuke KAWAHIRA