LEEAY AIKAWA - I'm Half-Sick of Light
2025 | LEEAY AIKAWA
I’M HALF-SICK OF LIGHT
TORONTO
Sept 11 - Oct 18, 2025
Opening Reception: September 11, 2025, 6-8 pm.
Blouin Division is pleased to present I'm Half-Sick of Light, an exhibition by Leeay Aikawa in Toronto’s Project Space.
Having lived between her native Japan and Canada, Leeay Aikawa works in the in-between: not the clarity of belonging to one place, nor the disorder of exile, but the shifting gradients of both. Her new project at Blouin Division, I’m Half-Sick of Light, grounds itself in shadow—not as absence, but as the condition where meaning thickens, where order loosens, and where opacity holds.
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s 1933 essay “In Praise of Shadows” reminds us that beauty emerges not from brightness but from the gradations of shadow: lacquer glowing in candlelight or the pooled darkness of a wooden alcove. Against the modern compulsion to eradicate obscurity—to move from candle to oil lamp to gaslight to electricity—he insists that shadow itself is aesthetic depth. Aikawa’s papier-mâché and carved wood work embodies this sensibility; its uneven textures catch light only in fragments, allowing depth to emerge in dimness. What Tanizaki identified as richness becomes present in her refusal of polish and easy visibility.
Édouard Glissant, writing later and in another context, echoes this refusal: his concept of opacity names the right to remain unknowable, irreducible to clarity, resisting the demand for visibility. Aikawa’s use of a found mannequin torso embodies this stance as a body fragment that both reveals and withholds all at once. In dialogue with Glissant, her work insists that what cannot be fully ordered or explained is not a deficiency but a dignity, a form of presence that holds its ground.
Here, Wallace Stevens’s phrase “the idea of order” clarifies what’s at stake. To shine light is to impose order: to render the world legible, structured, and subject to the human imagination. Aikawa’s work asks instead: what if we allow shadow to obscure order? What if meaning could live in obscurity, gradation, and the refusal of full visibility? Her work becomes expressive within its creases and hollows, showing how order frays in the half-seen and how meaning multiplies when things are not fully graspable.
Aikawa’s materials stage this orientation: papier-mâché with wire armature, a found mannequin torso, and carved wood inspired by Japanese Noh masks. Each catches and withholds light, their surfaces gathering shadows that never resolve into clarity. These objects root the work in land (the density of matter), in place (the specificity of here), and in time (light shifting with hour and season). In these conditions, Aikawa finds grounding not in resolution, but in the cyclical processes where life and death, belonging and estrangement, and visibility and obscurity fold into one another.
I’m Half-Sick of Light offers no order to master, no light without remainder. Instead, it dwells in thickness, navigating a shifting cultural identity where things stay partly hidden, where opacity protects what perhaps shouldn’t be fully seen, and where the here and now are most palpable in what resists resolution.
Text by Erin Storus
Leeay Aikawa gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council.
