今日もみんなのコンビニを描いた。

Minnano Gallery is pleased to present ‘Convenience Stores For Everyone’, a solo exhibition by Masaya Yoshioka. Focusing on paintings depicting ‘convenience stores’, from his early works to his latest, the exhibition traces the artist's journey and explores the existence and original landscape of contemporary Japanese people.

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​Conveni, convenience store in Japanese, is a motif that Yoshioka has been painting for a long time and is one of the representative landscapes in his paintings, where an unrealistic situation develops in an everyday life.
Convenience stores first appeared in Yoshioka's paintings in 2004, when they suddenly appeared in a town in the region where he lives. The surrounding area is farmland, where darkness reigns at night. For Yoshioka, the convenience store shining brightly was an encounter with the unknown. The work he drew from this encounter is called ‘To the place where there is light’, and is the first work in which he drew a motif of a convenience store.

Yoshioka perceived a scenery of Conveni as intuitively picturesque, overlapping with Tadanori Yokoo's Y-junction series or the night cafés of Van Gogh and  Edward Hopper. Since then, the convenience store has become an important landscape in Yoshioka's paintings.

When the works painting Conveni were first exhibited, it was met with controversy. Critics said that the motif was ‘commonplace and the artist himself would eventually get bored with this kind of theme’, but the work called Entrance Ceremony, which painted a man and a woman having a sex in front of Conveni, was recommended by former Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara in 2008 and won the prize of the Tokyo Wonder Wall competition organised by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. Despite this, the work was subsequently refused to be exhibited in the winners' exhibition held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Office.

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The works in the same series had been exhibited in metropolitan facilities before the TMG exhibition (although the refusal to exhibit was also contradicted by this history), and the evaluation of the works at the time was that they ‘suggest resistance to the negative elements of contemporary society, such as the pursuit of convenience, commercialism and excessive media coverage’. In reality, however, Yoshioka painted Conveni from that time to the present based on the intuition that it was picturesque, and had no intention of highlighting the social symbolism of Conveni in his work.

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Given that the symbolism of Conveni has changed over time, the fact that such an assessment was made at the time was a reflection of the different perspectives of the viewer and what those perspectives were. Conveni at the time of the exhibition was a kind of symbolic presence in mass consumer society, whereas today's convenience stores function more strongly as important social infrastructure for people. Also, completely unnoticed by the Japanese, and unintentionally, the fact that convenience stores are part of the very Japanese landscape became apparent when visitors from abroad rushed to a nondescript spot with a view of Conveni in front of Mt Fuji.

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It was in 2023 that the long journey of works of Coveni showed signs of change. Works of Cenveni, including the award-winning ‘Entrance Ceremony’, which had been kept due to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Exhibition, appeared at Art Fair Tokyo 2023, which is said to be one of the largest art fairs in Japan. During those four days, Yoshioka felt that the reactions of the visitors who saw his works had completely changed from 20 years ago, as he was standing in the exhibition hall. Although, neither the artworks nor the artist's own attitude had changed since then.

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This exhibition is composed entirely of works painting convenience stores, and highlights how we now see Yoshioka's paintings, and what our existence is as seen through the works.