COLOURS BETWEEN WORDS
A Generation’s Sensibility Before Words
For the second year in a row, we are delighted to welcome gallery/studio CHARLOTTE.USAGI from Yokohama to Octopus Heart.
This year’s encounter is particularly meaningful, as Belgium and Japan celebrate 160 years of diplomatic relations. This anniversary was also the theme of the Brussels Flower Carpet this summer, with a monumental interpretation of Hokusai’s iconic Great Wave off Kanagawa.
Now, another wave has travelled from Kanagawa to Brussels.
Colours Between Words brings together around 30 emerging Japanese artists and more than 100 artworks, ranging from painting, drawing and contemporary Nihonga to illustration, abstraction, collage and three-dimensional practices.
The exhibition explores a generation shaped by Japan’s rich visual culture, while resisting easy categories such as manga, illustration or “kawaii”. Within familiar visual forms, each artist develops a deeply individual language.
Lines, colours, figures, symbolic motifs and empty spaces become vessels for intimacy, longing, memory, loneliness and anxiety — sensations that can be felt before they can be fully expressed in words.
As the artists themselves described it:
“I want to give form to sensations that have not yet become words.”
Belgium and Japan have very different visual traditions, yet both understand the power of images to tell stories and communicate what words cannot contain. Brussels therefore becomes a natural meeting point between these two cultures.
The relationship between CHARLOTTE.USAGI and Octopus Heart is still young, but it has already created beautiful exchanges. In the past year, some artists connected to Octopus Heart were able to exhibit at the gallery in Yokohama. We hope many more artists and stories will continue to travel in both directions.
All works in the exhibition are available for purchase directly through the Japanese gallery, with artworks across a wide and accessible range of prices.
Water, Transformation and Artuel
To celebrate the connection between Japan, Brussels and the recurring image of the wave, we are placing Youn Goff’s interpretation of Hokusai’s Great Wave in the spotlight.
Created for Octopus Heart’s third anniversary, his linocut introduces plastic bottles into the water, turning the famous wave into a subtle reflection on pollution. The work also pays tribute to the reproducible nature of Japanese printmaking: original art that can circulate and remain accessible to different budgets.
Youn began making art following a burnout in 2023. His Healing series uses the raw strength of linocut to express what words could not — transforming a painful experience into form, movement and meaning. His Great Wave and octopus prints are still available in the Octopus Shop.
The current of water continues through Les Routes de l’Eau, the itinerant project of Guatemalan artist Alex Barnica.
At its centre is a blue jaïma: a nomadic tent that began its journey on the beaches of Mauritania and has now reached Brussels. Alex has been working in this tent live at Octopus Heart.
Water becomes a route, a border and a connection. Through landscapes, boats, fish and the travelling tent, he explores both the physical and inner migration. His evolving work carries three questions:
What are you searching for?
What have you left behind?
What do you hope to find?
The work is not transported because it is finished. It is created and transformed precisely because it travels.
Visitors can also discover Artuel, several of its creations and Octopus Heart’s new card game, alongside a selection of original octopus artworks and objects for our devoted octopus collectors.