YOKOTA TOKYO was pleased to present Yuko Shiraishi's “after The Garden of Forking Paths”.
The exhibition was based on a landscape she saw in a dream and takes advantage of the spacious gallery space to the fullest.
This Tokyo show built upon her previous exhibition, Through, held at Annely Juda Fine Art in London; together, these exhibitions were part of the "Imaginary Architecture" series that Shiraishi has been pursuing in recent years.

※ Performance was held on the final day of the exhibition, Friday, December 6th.

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after The Garden of Forking Paths

“after The Garden of Forking Paths” is a project inspired by a dream that emerged as a prophetic message.

Over the past two years, I had been invited to solo exhibitions in gallery spaces in both London and Tokyo, yet I was uncertain about what to do. Then, one night this January, two images vividly appeared to me in my sleep: one representing the space in London, and the other in Tokyo. They appeared to me during REM sleep.

I have always been fascinated by dreams, or the relationship between dreams and the functioning of the brain.

As an extension of my ongoing project, “Imaginary Architecture,” “The Garden of Forking Path” evolved from dream into reality.

I spoke of “prophetic messages” from dreams because in ancient Egyptian, Greek mythology, as well as Japanese folklore and mythology, they were often regarded as divine or otherworldly messages.

I often find resonance with the writings of the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, particularly in his reflections on dreams:

All this the dreamer sees in a single glance, in the same way that God, from His vast eternity, sees the whole cosmic process. And what hap pens when we wake? What happens is that, as we are accustomed to a sequential life, we give a narrative structure to our dream, though our dream has been multiple and simultaneous.

――“Nightmare” Jorge Luis Borges

Borges’ stories often take us into worlds of multiverses and parallel universes. The title of my project is derived from one of his short story collections.

I knew that the emotional regions of the brain are up to 30 percent more active during REM sleep than when we are awake. And we utilize areas of the brain that remain dormant during wakefulness.
All living beings, even fruit flies, experience sleep.
Could it be that we are indeed receiving messages from somewhere else?

Yuko Shiraishi