Chihiro Taki
Escape Into a Dream
6 - 21 November 2026
In a world where images, sounds and information compete constantly for our attention, Chihiro Taki turns towards the world of dreams as a place of escape and personal freedom.
Dreams have been a recurring theme in Taki’s work since her student years, offering a refuge from the pressures of reality and a space where fears, desires and imagination can take shape. As she has grown older, her relationship with this inner world has evolved, yet its attraction remains unchanged.
Taki’s distinctive visual language combines delicate figurative painting with unexpected, sometimes unsettling imagery. Working with oil, tempera, watercolour and gouache, often incorporating gold or silver leaf, she pays particular attention to fine details, textures and subtle shifts in colour. Her compositions bring together recognisable figures and dreamlike situations, creating scenes that feel both intimate and strangely unfamiliar.
In Escape into a Dream, Taki explores the delicate boundary between reality and imagination, drawing on personal experience to reflect on the desire to withdraw, protect oneself and find freedom beyond the demands of everyday life.
Artist's Statement
Since my student days, dreams have appeared again and again in my work.
A secret hiding place that belongs only to me, somewhere I can escape from the pain of reality.
As I have grown older, I have gradually learned how to face life's challenges and how to protect myself. Even so, there are still times when I want to let go of everything and shut myself away somewhere.
The world of dreams remains, as ever, an alluring place of escape.
We live in a restless age, where sounds, images and information constantly rush around us. I step away from that world for a moment and close my eyes.
There, beyond anyone else's reach, is a world of dreams that belongs only to me.
Chihiro Taki
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Chihiro Taki
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Chihiro Taki (b. 1988, Saitama, Japan) is a Japanese contemporary artist whose paintings explore dreams, identity and the psychological complexities of human experience. She studied painting at Tokyo University of the Arts, completing her master's degree in 2013, and at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze in Italy, where she completed a second master's degree in 2018.
Drawing on historical and religious imagery, Taki reinterprets familiar visual traditions through a contemporary perspective. Her paintings bring together imagination, personal experience and symbolic references, exploring the tensions between vulnerability and strength, reality and fantasy.
Dreams have remained a central theme throughout her practice, offering a space in which fears, desires and questions of identity can take visual form. Through her distinctive figurative language, Taki examines how we confront the world around us and create private spaces of freedom and escape.