HONG KONG — The elusive fashion designer Jun Takahashi’s name made a surprise appearance on the Hong Kong art scene as a collaborator in Japan-based ink artist Alia Sugawara’s solo exhibition “Konketsu” in Tai Hang, a residential area southeast of the bustling shopping district Causeway Bay.
Running from Saturday to May 10, the showcase at Otherthings by The Shophouse features a series of paper-based artworks co-created with Undercover’s Takahashi, art director Tetsuya Nagato and ceramist Kenta Anzai.
Sugawara said her first solo show outside Japan explores themes of duality, transformation and hybridity through hanging scrolls, folding screens and mounted pieces painted with ink ground from locally sourced flaxseed oil soot black inkstick.
“The last time I was here, the gallery’s owner [Alex Chan] took me to a local stationery store. I found an ink and some brushes that I really liked,” she said. “I used them because I wanted to use Hong Kong materials for this collection.”
“Konketsu,” which means “mixed blood” in Japanese, refers both to her genealogy and to her fascination with nature’s in‑between states, depicted through the bat-butterfly hybrids that take center stage in her work.
Artwork by Alia Sugawara.
Courtesy
Born in Sapporo to a Japanese and American background and raised between cultures, Sugawara attended an art-focused high school, studying charcoal drawing, but went on to pursue environmental science and mathematical science at the University of British Columbia and Waseda University.
She said the hybrid iconography was inspired by natural encounters in Hayama, a coastal town an hour south of Tokyo, where she resides.
“All the themes that I’ve painted so far are things that I’ve had some sort of interaction with in real life,” she explained during a walk-through ahead of Art Basel Hong Kong kicking off next Tuesday.
“And just as I’m staring at them, my imagination kind of gets to work, and I start to see it transform in some way, and then that’s what I paint. They exist in my mind, and I’m just spilling it onto paper,” she added.
Earlier in her practice she favored crisp, controlled lines and clearly defined forms. With “Konketsu,” she set herself the challenge of loosening up and, to get the exact shapes and strokes she wanted for this body of work, Sugawara estimated she painted more than 1,000 butterflies in preparation.
“I wasn’t classically trained in Chinese calligraphy, but I really loved the ink just as a medium. The more unintentional it looks, the more skill it requires. I really wanted to push myself to reach that level of freedom,” she said.
Artwork by Alia Sugawara in collaboration with Jun Takahashi and Tetsuya Nagato.
Courtesy
A hero piece from “Konketsu” is a revitalized Japanese antique folding screen with a black lacquer frame. Sugawara remounted the front with her painting on vintage silk, while Takahashi decorated the back with patchworks of stars and drew Pinkman, an alien-like character that most recently appeared in Undercover’s spring 2025 men’s collection.
In another large-scale collaborative piece, she painted Takahashi’s other well-known figure, Grace, first introduced in Undercover’s spring 2009 collection, together with her bat-butterfly hybrids over a paper collage by Nagato using vintage music box punch sheets.
“I think our styles all flow smoothly together,” she said. “So this is a really enjoyable process.”
