Houston
Umico Niwa’s current exhibition, “Memory Palace” (on view through October 12, 2025), doubles as an exhilarating scavenger hunt through the Asia Society Center’s two floors, revealing something charming and playful about the capacity of architectural adornment to intimate and structure selfhood. The Japanese artist’s personal examination of the (im)material contingencies of embodiment unfolds as an unconventional presentation of 12 oneiric, ikebana-esque sculptures consisting of metal and floral elements (all works 2025). These conceptually charged figures, which she began making in 2021, engage and alchemize a dialectic between non-Western ideas of objecthood and overlapping qualities of memory. Formalizing interconnectedness and unfixed essence through a reflexively dichotomous positioning, Niwa’s site-specific interventions make space for considered focus on the informing transcendence and social reification of the art object and the ritual emergence of the self.
Without knowing much about the nature of the show, it would be considerably easy to miss much of the work on view, even with the benefit of the interactive guide. Niwa’s decision to place the works in peripheral areas of the building—under staircases, on the edges of outdoor structures, hanging mischievously in high crevices—is unconventional, even contentious. While the map provides visitors with a rough sketch of where the “beguiling creatures” (in the artist’s words) can be found and a colorful illustrative legend that seems to whimsically mimic spatial choreography, it doesn’t detail precisely where the locations are on the floor plan. Staccato phrases like “dandelion puffs,” “potato tornadoes” (referring to several sprawling, caramel-colored sculptures under the stairs), and “butterfly wings” take the place of full descriptions.
architectural memory series: drifting synapse, a piece made of electroplated copper and foraged material that resembles a naturally formed assemblage of branches and seedpods found in the wild, sits on a ledge near the main entrance. In the environmental conditions of the space, its copper luster and tone escape visibility, replaced by an almost ghost-like silhouette. Elsewhere, white dandelion seed heads and other flowery beings are inserted into thin gaps between stone tiles and the cherry wood panels in the first-floor lobby; another appears in a vent-like element located in the second-floor entryway. “Daphnes,” Niwa’s affectionate name for these pewter-cast works, underscores the themes of transformation and obfuscation explored spatially and materially in the exhibition.
Perhaps the most easily located arrangement is architectural memory series: opium dendrite, a low-lying piece placed on an edge of the Elkin Foundation Water Garden. Viewable from the Reflective Water Garden Terrace, it echoes the form of a pared-down torii gate (which marks the entrance to a Shinto shrine), effectively grounding the show’s motifs and liturgical undertones. Even this work, with its rather unobstructed visibility, takes a second to register as part of the show since it coexists with the garden’s supporting architectural structure.
Niwa’s ontological provocation gives rise to a particularly sharp experiential disjunction. Since her nymph-like creatures take shape in torqued hybridity—both legible and illegible—they cleverly mirror the currents of uncertainty invoked by the presentation, with its inversions of traditional sculptural viewing practices and their stakes. By the same token, the works’ challenging placement could easily find antagonism in the realm of disability politics. Nevertheless, the experience and its takeaways are moving, making for a compelling exhibition that challenges the conventions of sculpture and our faculties of perception.
