Naoki KOIDE: Silent Guardians

LINSEED is pleased to present “Silent Guardians”, a solo exhibition by Naoki KOIDE (b. 1968, Japan). Moving between sculpture and painting, Koide’s practice unfolds at a measured pace and consistently revolves around family, companionship, and return. His works approach these themes with gentleness and humor, translating personal emotions into forms that can be sensed. Beneath their apparent lightness lies a careful observation of relationships, time, and love.

Once positioned as the one being protected, the artist now finds himself in the role of a parent who must protect others. The desire to safeguard one’s child exists alongside moments that cannot be faced through individual effort alone. It is through these experiences of protection, responsibility, and uncertainty that Koide repeatedly returns to the image of the komainu. These paired guardian figures commonly found at Japanese temples and shrines. In Koide’s work, they are no longer merely traditional symbols, but are invested with familial projection, carrying sensations of protection, companionship, and shifting positions.

During a recent residency in Jingdezhen, Koide’s experience with blue-and-white porcelain subtly echoed his earlier experiences with oil painting during his student years. Restrained pastel tones are gently laid across the canvas, never rushing to dominate the surface but leaving space to breathe through mutual restraint. Flattened grey fields intersect with subtly humorous figures, while finely rendered floral motifs introduce layered rhythms across the picture plane. The figures rest quietly side by side, forming gentle relationships in stillness.

Between sculptures and paintings, “Return” gradually emerges as a posture rooted in the present. In the exhibition, Squid Head stands silently, its vertically stacked form resembling both a tower and a ruin, imbued with the atmosphere of a fictional era - suggestive of history, yet resistant to alignment with any known past. Themes of family no longer appear as imagery, but are translated into structural presence: quiet, stable, and enduring. Return, here, is not a retreat into memory, but a re-grounding after traversing the outside world, a way of standing again at the point of one’s own sensibility. Through humor and tenderness, Koide’s works gently counter the unease brought by shifting roles and the passage of time, allowing feelings of family, companionship, and love to be held, sustained, and carried forward.

Naoki KOIDE was born in Aichi, Japan in 1968.  He graduated from Tokyo Zokei University in 1992 and currently lives and works in Chiba. His practice spans sculpture, painting, photography and installation, with many of biomorphic figures drawn from people and animals closely tied to his daily life. Koide frequently situates his sculptural figures within specific narrative settings, through photography and installation to pull these fictional characters into a ritualised space of reality, where the work cultivates an ambiguous register of perception between private fantasy and collective nostalgia. By merging and unsettling traditional sculptural vocabularies, the temporality of materials and the private emotion, Koide has developed a creative language that moves between play and ritual, fairy tale and relic, and opens onto an ongoing inquiry into memory, relationships and the boundaries between life and death.