GOCA by Garde is pleased to present The Floating Field, a three-artist presentation for VOLTA Basel 2026 bringing together Seongmin Ahn, Aya Kawato, and Kanta Kimura. Working from two distinct traditions — East Asian and European — and in idioms entirely their own, the three painters arrive at a shared proposition: that a painting is not a surface on which an image is held still, but a field in which color, form, and viewpoint remain in motion — and in which nothing carries its value alone.
The presentation takes its cue from a phrase of Kanta Kimura's, who speaks of the painted ground not as a backdrop but as "a site where movement is generated and accumulated." Two ideas — rooted in East Asian thought, yet open to any eye — run through the booth. The first is ukiyo, the floating, transient world, reframed here not as a melancholy over impermanence but as the affirmative condition of a surface that refuses to settle: the gaze is never allowed to come to rest on a finished image. The second is engi (縁起), or mutual arising — the understanding that nothing exists in isolation, that a color, a line, or a vantage takes on its value only in relation to what surrounds it, and may, within that relation, even reverse. If floating is the phenomenon, mutual arising is its logic. Together they describe painting as a relation in motion rather than an image at rest.
Kanta Kimura carries the logic of ukiyo into the European tradition of oil on canvas. Over a dried, monochrome ground he releases liquid paint and drives it with compressed air — at times with his own breath — condensing form through a process held between control and chance. What remains is not a reproduced image but movement itself. His practice proceeds equally from engi: forms and colors are treated not as isolated elements but as a dynamic network, each coming into being through its relations. The result is a surface smooth and uniform to the touch yet ceaselessly in flux within — flat to the hand, dimensional to the eye.
Aya Kawato begins from a rigorous grid system drawn from the structures of weaving and the findings of neuroscience — an emblem of absolute, rational control. Yet the heart of her inquiry lies in the minute imperfections that surface within that exacting system. By admitting the margin of error inherent in handwork, and the unpredictable behavior of the paint itself — those ungovernable elements — the perfect grid begins to waver. Color emerges in the relation between adjacent hues, viewing distance, and ambient light, shimmering into a gentle vertigo. In her hands, the grid is released from the frame meant to fix it, and floats. Here mutual arising becomes optics: no hue owns its value; each is conditioned by its neighbor.
Seongmin Ahn carries the multiple, shifting viewpoints of Korean reverse perspective onto hanji, mulberry paper. Rather than fixing an object from a single position, she gathers it from several at once, so that the eye finds no vanishing point on which to settle and the image floats among its vantages. Drawing on the iconography of minhwa, Korean folk painting, she lets mountains brim over from within a teacup — an image of elegant dissonance. The red and gold once permitted only to a king of the Joseon dynasty are transposed onto the form of a handgun, turning the very meaning of the object inside out. In her work, meaning is never intrinsic; it arises from relation, and can reverse — engi made visible.
The common ground among the three is more than visual affinity. As Josef Albers taught, color is the most relative of media — never perceived in isolation, always conditioned by its neighbor. Albers's perceptual modernism arrives, from the West, at an insight long named in the East as engi: that what we perceive holds no independent, self-standing existence. Across the field of this presentation, two traditions prove to describe a single condition; and painting — floating, relational, perpetually arising — offers, in turn, an elevated, contemplative vantage on the flow of our passing days.
ARTISTS
AYA KAWATO (b. 1988, Nara, Japan) has recently held solo exhibitions at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery (Tokyo, Japan, 2023), Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art (Kyoto, Japan, 2022), Pierre-Yves Caer Gallery, (Paris, France, 2020) and AIFA (Geneva, Switzerland, 2019), among others. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions including The Secrets of Color from Impressionism to Contemporary Art, Pola Museum of Art (Kanagawa, Japan, 2024), Nippon Mania, Contemporary Art from Japan, Kunsthaus Kaufbeuren (Kaufbeuren, Germany, 2023) and Rêver 2074, FIAC 2017, Grand Palais (Paris, France, 2017).
Her work is in the collection of CHANEL G.K. and The University Art Museum at Tokyo University of the Arts, among others. Commissioned works include the State Guest House, EXPO 2025 Osaka (Osaka, Japan, 2025), Longchamp Wien (Vienna, Austria, 2021), Meta Open Arts Commission / Facebook (Tokyo, Japan, 2020), LONGCHAMP / La Maison Ginza (Tokyo, Japan, 2019). Awards include the Nomura Art Prize bestowed by the Nomura Foundation in 2018, the Grand Prix at Rêver 2074 given by Comité Colbert and Tokyo University of the Arts in 2017, and the Tomio Koyama Prize at the 11th TAGBOAT AWARD Exhibition held by TAGBOAT in 2016.
SEONGMIN AHN (b. Seoul, Korea) holds an MFA in Asian Traditional Painting from Seoul National University and an MFA in Multidisciplinary Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She possesses extensive teaching experience at esteemed institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Queens Museum, and the Asia Society. Her works are included in the public collections of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Korea), Princeton University Art Museum, Hudson River Museum, and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. Selected exhibitions include solo shows at the Hudson River Museum (2023), The Korea Society (2023), and Hello Museum (Seoul, 2024), as well as group exhibitions at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul). Ahn is the recipient of numerous accolades, including grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.
KANTA KIMURA (b. 1982 Koblenz, Germany) is a Japanese-German painter based in Berlin. Kimura’s paintings take inspiration from the Buddhist concept of Ukiyo, meaning “the floating, transient world.” The ideas of continuous flow and transformation are expressed through contemporary and abstract forms, where the changes occurring on the surface appear not as fixed images, but as traces of movement itself. Equally central is the notion of Engi, the idea that nothing exists independently, but emerges through relationships and interdependence. Forms, colours, and movements are understood as part of a dynamic network rather than isolated elements.
Kimura’s technique involves applying oil paint and pigments on canvas using compressed air. Through this process, color appears as though it is in a continual state of transformation, forming dynamic and abstract structures. This method results in a spatial field that, while smooth and uniform on the surface, contains an internal dynamism. The artist studied Fine Arts at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart and the Berlin University of the Arts. His work has been shown in institutions such as the Nationalmuseum Bukarest, Romania, the Tomioka Art Museum, Japan, and Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include NAPIER, Circle Culture Gallery, Berlin 2026, Ukiyo at Galerie am Klostersee, Lehnin, 2025 and flatwave, BcmA, Berlin, 2021.
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