New York – GOCA by Garde is pleased to present its summer group exhibition, “Stand clear of the closing doors, please.” Taking its title from the familiar announcement heard in the New York City subway, the exhibition captures the vivid present as experienced by three Japanese artists living and working in New York. In a world where global borders are increasingly “closing” like doors, the show proposes a renewed opening—of the human spirit and cultural diversity.
At a time when the world is progressively sealed off by geopolitical fragmentation, cultural exclusivity, and restrictions on the flow of people, goods, and capital, this exhibition addresses the unseen “doors” that surround and divide us. Through their distinct practices, Yuya Saito, Shinji Murakami, and Hiroshi Masuda offer a critical perspective from New York—asking what it means to remain open in an age of closure.
Yuya Saito centers his work on the ramp, a central structure in skateboarding culture that embodies anti-hierarchical and democratic values. His sculptural works reinterpret the ramp through an urban-critical lens. Influenced by his experience surviving the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, Saito explores the dynamic between human presence and the city. Incorporating traditional bentwood techniques used in Japanese furniture-making, his forms fuse “flow” and “structure” to evoke the spirit of fluid urbanism. His sculptures propose the possibility of embodied, liberatory access within the rigid frameworks of modern systems. As street culture entered art history—disrupting the line between high art and mass culture—Saito’s practice of flow-chitecture offers a spatial and temporal repetition that pushes the very language of art into transformative territory.
Shinji Murakami is an inventor of a new form of landscape painting rooted in 8-bit video game aesthetics. Using the universally accessible visual vocabulary of the Atari 2600, he constructs a unique world where nostalgia and the cutting-edge intersect. His works invite both contemplation and interaction, revisiting the concept of universality in our post-pop era. For this exhibition, Murakami draws inspiration from Utagawa Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo—a hallmark of Japonisme whose cultural resonance profoundly impacted artists such as Van Gogh and Whistler. By connecting past and present, Murakami encourages dialogue between viewer and artwork, transforming video games into a foregrounded artistic medium and generating new visual experiences that transcend generational and geographic boundaries.
Hiroshi Masuda fuses Eastern philosophy with the aesthetics of pop culture to engage with the fundamental question: “What is a human being?” With a background that includes traveling through 76 countries, Masuda approaches humanity through cultural, political, and social frameworks. And his artworks explore life itself through the lens of physics and philosophy, suggesting that our bodies are composed of molecules in constant flux—a perspective resonant with the Buddhist notions of non-self and impermanence. His integration of dichotomies—comedy and tragedy, justice and injustice—visualizes the Buddhist principle of non-discrimination. Through mitate, the Japanese art of seeing the familiar anew, Masuda introduces a subversive humor that critically destabilizes the viewer’s social footing.
Despite their distinct media and backgrounds, all three artists share a commitment to accessibility, fluidity, and interconnection—values that stand in direct contrast to the isolating tendencies of contemporary society. Saito’s ramp symbolizes open urban structures; Masuda’s molecular vision of life captures the ceaseless circulation of atoms in the world; and Murakami’s digital worldview offers a universally navigable aesthetic. Together, they issue a quiet yet powerful resistance to the doors that divide us, reimagining how we might open them once again.
“Stand clear of the closing doors, Please” offers not only an artistic statement but a renewed vantage point—one that seeks to recover the possibility of movement, connection, and dialogue in a closing age. Traversing painting, sculpture, and digital media with conceptual freedom, this exhibition becomes a site to interrogate not just our aesthetic sensibilities, but the worldview that underpins our hegemonic and imperial structures of understanding.
About the Artists
Yuya Saito
Saito was born in Japan and is currently based in New York. Deeply influenced by skateboard culture and street culture since childhood, he creates work that explores the relationship between urban city and human being. He is attempting to create a new visual language called “flow-chitecture.” Rather than using conventional materials such as canvas or panels, Saito builds his visual world around the ramp—a semicircular structure used in skateboarding—as his primary motif. In his practice, he incorporates bentwood, a traditional woodworking technique often used in furniture making, combining this with street aesthetics. By merging elements that seemingly have no direct connection—craft-based tradition and urban subculture—he seeks to develop a new visual language for reinterpreting the contemporary city.
Shinji Murakami
Shinji Murakami’s work springboards from the philosophy Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology of Gunpei Yokoi, inventor of Nintendo’s Game & Watch and Game Boy. In this context, withered technology refers to mature technology that is cheap and well understood, and lateral thinking is the finding of radical new ways to use such tech. Murakami considers his practice a lateral thinking interrogation of the pixelated expressions in 8-bit video games.
Hiroshi Masuda
Hiroshi Masuda is a Japanese visual artist whose work bridges cultural tradition, global experience, and contemporary questions of humanity and existence. Now based in New York, his practice reflects a journey shaped by unexpected turns, Buddhist influences, and a desire to reimagine how we see the world. Currently, Hiroshi Masuda is the 2025 artist-in-residence for the Nowhere Studio Program in Brooklyn, New York.
