For his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, Otake presents a new body of works in egg tempera, painting on wooden board, and one fresco transfer. The primary medium of Renaissance artists, tempera was reputed for its lustrous and water-resistant finish – a consequence of binding powdered pigments with egg yolk. Otake’s interest in these specialised techniques began during his formative years as a student at Kyoto City University of Arts, whose faculty schooled him in the Early Italian Renaissance period. Directly inspired by these foundational experiences in higher education, Otake’s early years as a painter involved developing his skill in oil and mural painting, a practice later enriched by his travels across Europe, during which time he encountered first-hand those masterpieces he had long revered.

Everyday events take on strange new life in the paintings of ‘Agoraphilia’, visual feasts brimming with detail that reveal the presence of worlds within worlds. As the exhibition title suggests, Otake was particularly drawn to the agora as both site of action and conceptual framework. The Greek word for ‘assembly’, the agora was the marketplace of ancient times where the city’s people would gather and intermix, irrespective of their background or stature. As a venue for the exchange of goods and gossip, the agora served as the commercial locus for the flow of trade capital but was equally a place where belief structures and value registers came to bear. Painting the marketplace and its many textures, Otake engages with systems of circulation, the logic of consumerism and the dynamics of reciprocity. The heightened delirium of these scenes also doubles as an allegory for contemporary metropolitan society, and contemplate the sometimes-confused, sometimes-painful anxieties and absurdities of the hyper-capitalist city.

Myco-Market Day (2026) immediately recalls the bustling shopping strip depicted in Balthus’s The Street (1933). Unlike the raucous activity of Balthus’s painting, however, Otake’s work appears to depict a peaceful and orderly bazaar, but one that, on closer inspection, is littered with small signs of deception and creeping decay. In the upper right quadrant, for example, a rictus body is being carried away, while in the lower right foreground, a child thieves from the open bag of a stopping shopper. Here, the illusion of prosperity distracts from moments of desperation, acts of necessity and hints of decline. In the centre of composition, Otake has planted an unmissable character: a bird-person with white plumage pointing at a basket of fruit.

This charismatic creature appears in multiple paintings, but most pronouncedly as the protagonist of The Magnate (2025). Caught in the midst of making a house call, Otake’s magnate is decorated like a Christmas tree or child’s mobile, replete with dangling ornaments. He is seen accepting a necklace from a kneeling street-seller, eyes wide with a zombie-like vacancy, while a suited figure in the background attempts to steal the bag of coins dragging lazily behind him. Visualising a circular economy defined by possession and dispossession, The Magnate raises further questions about the entanglement of political power and the drive for wealth.

Using a nostalgia-invoking palette in which ochres predominate, the artist seems to contend that these issues are not contemporary but age-old. In his compositions, a viewer may register centuries-old painterly traditions, ones that also refer to the longstanding use of art as a vehicle of social critique. Otake’s work Crossroads (2026), for example, appears as if it could be a small corner of action in the apocalyptic gardens of 15th-century master painter Hieronymus Bosch, whose diverse, sprawling worlds upset normative axes of good and evil, heaven and earth. An Apparition Seen at the Former Suwayama Zoo (2024), meanwhile, recalls Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 16th-century village chronicles, which treated peasant life as an equally worthy subject for art, and whose sympathetic depictions serve to both endear and document. The changing scales and foci of Otake’s paintings, too, elicit the 16th-century monumental genre scenes of Pieter Aertsen, whose close studies of those peopling everyday settings like markets or kitchens centred an otherwise invisible workforce. Such is the case with Otake’s The Mushroom Shop (2026), which shows market-goers purchasing miniature, mushroom-capped versions of themselves, confusing the distinction between the consumer and the consumed.

While using art-historical techniques of the West, the artist’s meticulously choreographed market scenes also dialogue with secular paintings from the East. The panoramic, two-panel work Night Parade of One Hundred Fungi (2026) is Otake’s own rendition of Hyakki Yagyō, a nighttime parade of supernatural beings that was famously depicted by Kawanabe Kyosai (1831–89). In it, the street’s commercial storefronts have closed as a carnival procession of insects, marine life and human-fungal hybrids reclaims the thoroughfare in the city, transforming a place of economic exchange into a site of multiplicity and mobilisation. To create Night Parade, Otake employed a technique called strappo, which translates from the Italian as ‘tear’ or ‘pull’. Devised to detach and preserve frescoes, strappo is favoured by art conservationists and involves a painstaking and precarious process of transfer. Otake had to first complete the painting on a wall, before then applying a layer of adhesive material and gauze to its surface. Once dry, the gauze was gently peeled away and applied to a wooden board, where the gauze was removed with water and the transposed painting left to dry.

Portraying human and non-human entities in densely populated scenes, Otake interrogates the cadence of an everyday life structured by movement and exchange. In so doing, he also envisages moments of collective participation and interspecies harmony between animal hybrids, fungi, flora and fauna, revealing human assembly as just another form of organic growth. Above all, the artist’s paintings re-imagine the marketplace in terms of the most primal interactions. From the expendability of life itself to the insatiable nature of desire, Otake’s diverse cast of characters engage in seemingly mundane acts of transaction that are, at once, complex metaphors for social life.

Shigeo Otake (b. 1955, Kobe, Japan), lives and works in Kobe, Japan. Otake received a BFA and an MFA from the Kyoto City University of Arts, Japan, between 1979 and 1981. Recent solo exhibitions include Consortium Museum, Dijon & Venice (2026); American Art Catalogues, New York (2025); Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Shanghai (2025) & Beijing (2023); and ADZ Gallery, Lisbon (2024). He has had numerous group exhibitions, including Shibunkaku, Tokyo (2026); Frieze No. 9 Cork Street, London (2025); He Art Museum, Foshan, China (2025); Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, China (2025); and Gladstone, New York (2024), among others.