With travel restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic affecting original plans for the 2020 exchange, this year’s exhibition focuses on the underlying agenda of the Chicago Obihiro Exchange Program: to reframe the conversation around cultural diegesis in the arts. Featuring Chicago-based artists Hua Xi Zi and Jennifer Chen-su Huang, New York-based artist Taro Takizawa, and Kiyomi Negi & Kioto Aoki of AIRMW, 思考回路• Shikoukairo II brings together a group of artists whose practices employ a visual and conceptual rhetoric intuitively influenced by their diasporic background, yet beyond a diegetic search for cultural identity through their work.  

The exhibition revisits the concept of shikoukairo – meaning patterns of thought. The 2019 Shikoukairo show introduced the concept to highlight the multiplicities of approaches by Japanese and Japanese American artists outside the archetypal, diegetic confines of the search for cultural identity through art. This year, shikoukairo acquires a new meaning, as the artists simultaneously reflect on what it means to make work and how one does so during extended isolation. The process and material-based works are occipital, tactile and linguistic explorations that try to question and reassess the relationship between body, mind, and our immediate environment of the home space, social space, and physical space.