Agoraphilia /
White Cube Hong Kong /
Jul 10 – Aug 29, 2026 /

A bird-man; one-eyed faces sprouting petal-like rays; life-size mushrooms that function as umbrellas – Shigeo Otake’s surreal paintings feature a curious cast of recurring hybrid characters and motifs.

One in particular, a girl in a red dress, appears in almost all the works on view for Agoraphilia at White Cube Hong Kong. At times she’s peering from a doorway in a corner, placed at the entrance of a market in a public square, in front of a gate or between two tentacled creatures – always poised at a threshold, traversing the invisible porosity between two entities.

With Agoraphilia, Otake creates and explores the possibilities that arise when human and otherworldly realms blur, describing its imagined population as “inhabitants of another world who have somehow slipped into our own, and ordinary people who find themselves in the other world”.

To forge this perspective, the artist needed a figure who represented an ordinary person – the viewer – and conceived the girl in red, whose classic uniform, apparent innocence and curiosity bring to mind the adventurous spirit of children’s-book characters: the French schoolgirl Madeline and Alice of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. “She may also be a projection of myself,” Otake says.

The artist is known for putting his own transformative twist on myths and folklore, combining Japanese influences with western, specifically Renaissance techniques to create his paintings.

At first glance, Otake’s intricately crafted narratives form visuals evocative of storybook illustrations. Numerous influences reveal themselves at once, such as manga and kaiju (the genre of films in which monstrous creatures wreak havoc on metropolises) through his highly stylised figures and the chaos they seem poised to inflict. His complex compositions bring to mind the anarchic frenzy present in Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Hieronymus Bosch’s iconic works, which often depicted large gatherings and life in public spaces. Yet it’s Otake’s niche fascination with fungi and his studies of parasitic life and cordyceps that yield a one-of-a-kind aesthetic – where the perceived social hierarchy of human, animal and vegetal beings collapses.

A self-confessed “insect boy”, Otake has loved insects and enjoyed looking through illustrated books on plants and animals since childhood, as well as science magazines, where he developed a knowledge of cordyceps. However, it was after graduating from university and becoming a painter that he began incorporating fungi as a subject in his work. While staying in a shared mountainside studio on the outskirts of Kyoto, he encountered a large mushroom – over 30cm in diameter – prompting him to research local fungi. He came across a guide featuring the detailed illustrations of Daisuke Shimizu, best known for depicting fantasy landscape art that blends realism and natural scenery with fantastical, supernatural worlds. “I was especially fond of fantasy literature, detective and science fiction,” Otake recalls. “I would like viewers to be surprised by a different expression of a familiar story.”

Moments of drama and suspense live in the details of Otake’s vivid visuals, which is especially evident in works such as Phantom Realm Cafe (2026), where long-tongued, fish-like creatures peering from large shrubs in an outdoor cafe seem on the cusp of swallowing diners, waitstaff and their incoming orders in equal measure. In The Magnate (2026), amid what appears to be a potential roadside sale, a surreptitious figure in the corner can be stealing a small pouch hung from one of the wings of Otake’s hybrid bird-man icon.

Similar instances punctuate Night Parade of One Hundred Fungi (2026), a two-panel canvas that showcases the artist’s take on Hyakki Yagyō, a nighttime parade of supernatural beings famously depicted by Japanese painter and printmaker Kawanabe Kyōsai, often considered a pioneer of manga. Amid a carnivalesque atmosphere, Otake’s signature creatures – insects, marine life and human-fungal hybrids – lead a procession in front of shops that appear to be closed. All kinds of mushrooms sprout from every surface, from roofs to the tops of various heads.

The level of detail reflects an extremely laborious process. For this work specifically, in addition to using egg tempera, Otake’s preferred material, he employs another technique developed by Italian Renaissance painters: strappo, originally devised for preservation, to detach and maintain frescoes. Otake’s use of strappo includes completing the painting on a wall before applying gauze to the surface; once dry, the gauze is gently peeled away and applied to a wooden board, where the gauze is removed with water and the transposed painting left to dry.

While much of the western aspect of Otake’s artistic training was learned in art school in Japan, it was the six months he spent in Europe during his final year of university that were especially formative.

During this trip, the artist became fascinated with public squares and began using them as the setting for many of his paintings. “I also visited markets frequently, particularly food markets. There would be animal carcasses sold with their heads still attached or things that I could not even imagine how one might eat. There was always something surprising. I also found it fascinating how different the markets were from one country to another.”

Referencing French artist Balthus’s 1933 painting The Street, Otake’s Myco-Market (2026), depicting an open-air market in a public square, reflects his preoccupation with places of gathering and exchange. All manners of transaction and activity – both ordinary and chilling – unravel in this narrative. From the obvious display of various goods being sold to a child pickpocketing a woman’s handbag from underneath a stall in the foreground to the lower halves of two women hanging from windows and a seemingly dead body being hoisted in the air in the back right corner, Otake and the viewer are witness to all, vis-à-vis the girl in red who has a front-and-centre view.

Rather than critiquing the market’s transactional nature, Otake takes a more inquisitive and observational stance. By depicting the circle of exchange, he alludes to questions about the interconnectedness of power, money and everyday life. As such, public spaces where these interactions occur are optimal settings for many of Otake’s compositions.

“What I really want to depict is the kind of drama that arises when strange creatures and ordinary people come into contact with one another,” he says. “The marketplace is a particularly compelling setting for those encounters.” Otake’s desire to capture this interaction is perhaps most aptly realised in An Apparition Seen at the Former Suwayama Zoo (2024), where animals – giraffes, cheetahs and birds – are caged in captivity, while hybrid creatures and humans roam freely, interacting with each other and observing the animals.

It’s the natural world’s co-dependency that fascinates the artist, forming the foundation of his interest in fungal life – specifically how mushrooms live in relation to other organisms, forging mycorrhizal relationships with plants, decomposing dead wood or parasitising insects. He says that he values the fact that much is still unknown about the natural world. “I think that unknown realm is a precious resource. I feel a real sense of urgency about the possibility that parts of it may disappear through war or environmental destruction before we ever have the chance to know or understand it.”

The foundation of Otake’s work raises a more fundamental question – how do we find a more balanced way of living with nature that quenches humanity’s insatiable compulsion to consume? Perhaps the significance of the girl in the red dress standing at a threshold is to push us from observation to participation in achieving a more sustainable balance.