Getting Comfortable with the Elephant in the Room: Noboru Tsubaki at Towada Art Center

Tsubaki Noboru: FREEDOM––Living with “the Elephant in the Room” is a solo exhibition of new and site-specific works at Towada Art Center in Aomori Prefecture. Tsubaki (b. 1953) first grabbed international attention with Fresh Gasoline (1989), a tumor-shaped polyurethane sculpture in vivid yellow standing nearly 3 meters high and 3.6 meters long. The monstrous piece did more than catch eyes, it sparked discussion about humanity’s ecological impact and the conditions shaping life after the economic bubble of the eighties burst. Tsubaki has since exhibited across Japan, Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

Ants, Elephants, and Trojan Horses

aTTA (2008), a towering bright-red robot insect modeled after the Central American leafcutter ant, is permanently displayed on the museum’s front lawn. Tsubaki comes up with his artistic concepts independently, then works with factories and teams of people to realize them in a collaborative, non-linear process.

In an interview with All About Japan at the opening for his new exhibition, he said: “There’s something about the sheer size of large works that really moves people. There’s this ‘Wow!’ factor. Giant icons have the power to go beyond their assigned meanings and historical contexts. My works are all Trojan horses, in a sense. They may seem deceptively simple, but they have deeper political meanings.”

Among the more complex themes explored in the show are issues people avoid confronting (i.e., “elephants in the room”) and restrictions on personal freedom in our image-inundated modern society. Addressing a world in which people feel surveilled while bigger issues go ignored, the artworks––sculptures, installations, photographs, and paintings––blur the line between conceptual and popular art. The show’s title is rooted in a Japanese play on words: the characters for 象 (elephant) and 像 (image) look very similar.

A Map of the Mind

Four linked sections make ingenious use of the Towada Art Center’s architecture to convey Tsubaki’s worldview. The first, “The Elephant in the Room,” occupies a white cube space on the ground floor, with natural light streaming in through a wall-sized window. Here, the Elephant in the Room XL (2026), and the wheel of eyeballs, Metapolice (1997), speak to our tendency to look away from what we would rather not see––even when it looms conspicuously and comically large––and to our sense of being constantly watched in this age of news, social media, and endless image consumption. We cannot hide, even as we pretend not to see.

When asked what he considers to be today’s “elephants in the room,” Tsubaki named issues including war, AI, and a loss of purpose in education. “We’re seeing a breakdown in education’s role as a stabilizer between the individual and society. It’s become an engine of propaganda––a bulk processing facility that stifles individual creativity. This can put people on the path to war, like we’ve seen with Russia.”

These concerns aren’t just abstract ideas––they frame the entire structure of the exhibition. The second section, a long corridor titled “Degree of Contact Between Society and the Individual,” considers how a person can engage with the world while living alongside these thorny realities. The walls are lined with the artist’s soft-focused pastel photographs of flowers, a series called Under the Rose (2026).

The exhibition text notes that the word “rose” evokes love, beauty, and desire, and suggests that personal desires, expressed too clearly and directly, risk threatening the existing order and inviting rejection by society. “Perhaps it is best for personal desires to remain somewhat ‘out of focus,’ much like these photographs.” Tsubaki’s solution, it seems, is to learn to live in harmony with the “elephant,” rather than ignoring it or trying to eliminate it.

To the right of the hallway is “Tsubaki’s Inner Thoughts.” The artist spent two weeks living in this den-like room before the show’s opening, constructing it through what the exhibition describes as “the accumulation of his own ruminations.” The result is one large mixed-media installation, called The Order of Time (2026): It is filled with an armchair, a billiard table, books, DVDs, and works from his four-decade career. Among them is a painting from his student days, created as an homage to Surrealist masters, along with miniature models for his elephant sculpture and Fresh Gasoline.

The Search for Meaning

The final room, linked to the first by the corridor, explores the relationship between taboos and freedom in “The Intersection of Society and the Individual.” It houses two works: the Elephant in the Room M (2026), a wall-mounted balloon elephant head with an inflated trunk that connects to 1•2•3•4•5•6•7•8•9•10 (2026), a psychedelic acrylic painting depicting Friedrich Nietzsche, Vincent van Gogh, Salvador Dalí, and Giorgio de Chirico––all influences on Tsubaki. The word “Freedom” headlines the piece, painted by hand using images generated in conversation with an AI program.

Tsubaki sees this age of AI as part of a broader human search for meaning. “People look for meaning through things like working for big companies or going to “good schools”––this is true all over the world––but there will always be ‘bugs’ in the system,” he said. “We get fired, we get into accidents, we get sick. The things that give us ‘meaning’ are not in themselves stable or guaranteed, but society today is absolutely not producing people who can accept this reality or live with it as a premise… Artists should be the ones resisting this system, but instead they’re too swayed by financial markets. Art has lost its original meaning and been absorbed by the world of money. It’s lost its magic.”

His outlook is not entirely pessimistic, however. He sees hope for the future, as long as people continue in their search for significance while learning to engage with what makes them uncomfortable. As he explains in the exhibition text, today’s world requires the coexistence of the digital and the physical, which means finding a balance between artificial systems and their “bugs”––meaning our own individuality and creative expressions. “Connecting these two polar opposites is the key to living freely in this society,” he says.

Art on the Town

Besides the museum, Tsubaki’s works can be seen at two local shops during the exhibition period. The bookstore Tsundoku Books presents drawings of the aTTA (2008) robot ant sculpture. Matsumoto Chaho, a green tea, pottery, and antique shop established in 1908, is displaying a miniature model of aTTA among its wares.

Towada Art Center opened in 2008 with the aim of helping to revitalize a small historic city in northern Japan through contemporary art. The museum’s special exhibitions and its permanent collection are accessible and engaging for all ages and backgrounds.

The facility, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Ryue Nishizawa, is made up of independent “houses for art” connected by glass corridors. The rooms showcase the permanent collection of 41 commissioned artworks by 36 Japanese and international artists, including Yayoi Kusama, Yoshitomo Nara, Leandro Erlich, and Ron Mueck. Many of the white-cube spaces are custom-built for the artworks, with large windows making the pieces viewable from outside. The on-site Cube Cafe & Shop is a bright, colorful space offering light meals and snacks inspired by the exhibited artworks, as well as a selection of art books and museum merchandise.

Across the street, Art Square offers a playground-like collection of large, immersive outdoor sculptures. More public installations–including artist-designed benches–are found around the city.

DATA
Tsubaki Noboru: FREEDOM––Living with “the Elephant in the Room”
Dates: June 6 (Sat) – November 8 (Sun)
Venue: Towada Art Center (10-9 Nishi-Nibancho, Towada-shi, Aomori)
Hours: 9:00–17:00 (admission until 30 minutes before closing)
Closed: Mondays (except for National Holidays, in which case the museum is open on the holiday and closed the following Tuesday). Open on August 3 (Mon) and August 10 (Mon).
Admission: General ¥1,800 (including the permanent collection). Under 18: Free.
Website: https://towadaartcenter.com/en/exhibitions/tsubaki-noboru-freedom/