Shigeo Otake
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 …
