A Familiar Landscape of Japan

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Masaya Yoshioka has continued to paint landscapes featuring convenience stores. Using an Impressionistic touch, he depicts convenience stores along suburban roads as they take on different appearances from day to night and across different times of day. Yoshioka first painted a convenience store more than twenty years ago, and he has continued to return to this landscape ever since. This exhibition, One Hundred Convenience Stores, is the largest presentation of these paintings to date, following the 2024 exhibition Fiftysix Convenience Stores, which brought together 56 works from the series.

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For Yoshioka, his relationship with something that has once become a subject of his paintings does not simply come to an end. His subjects are part of everyday life. Convenience stores are a prime example: we encounter them countless times in the course of an ordinary day. Although they may be the same kind of store, the landscape around them is always slightly different. Yoshioka has repeatedly turned these familiar scenes into paintings.

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Among the convenience stores he has painted are places where the surrounding roads and buildings have changed since the works were made, as well as stores that have since closed. Perhaps the most immediately recognizable change is that some of the convenience store brands depicted in the paintings no longer exist. Confronted with such changes, we begin to realize that suburban convenience stores, despite seeming to be everywhere, have also become a defining landscape of contemporary Japan embedded in our collective memory.

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The Japanese painter Junkichi Mukai (1901–1995), active from the prewar through the postwar period, spent much of his life traveling throughout Japan and painting traditional thatched-roof houses that were disappearing as the country underwent rapid transformation during its period of high economic growth. His body of work, said to number around two thousand paintings, preserves a landscape of Japan that, only a century ago, could once have been found almost everywhere but has now largely disappeared. Yoshioka’s convenience store paintings may similarly come to convey the image of a particular era, as scenes that once seemed to be nothing more than ordinary everyday life gradually acquire a different meaning with the passage of time.

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For this reason, the “One Hundred” in the title does not signify the completion of the series. Just as Yoshioka did not stop painting convenience stores when the series was named Fiftysix Convenience Stores in 2024, one hundred is simply another point along the course of an ongoing practice. When a landscape we thought we knew so well appears before us in the form of one hundred paintings, what will we see, and what might we notice for the first time? We invite you to discover it for yourself at the gallery.