TOTO GALLERY·MA is pleased to present the exhibition "Yasutaka Yoshimura: MANGARCHITECTURE――Absence of an Architect" at the TOTO Museum (Kitakyushu, Fukuoka).

Since the early days of his architectural activities, Yasutaka Yoshimura has strived to establish various relationships between spontaneous movements, such as people's behavior, and different social conditions, such as social systems and situations so that architecture can serve as the bridge between the two.
He is exploring new ways of dwelling and living in the depopulating society Japan will face from now on. For example, with "Fukumasu Base" (2016), he covered a wooden structure with a ready-made tent warehouse to realize a childcare support facility where children can spend their time freely in a spacious open-plan space. With "Home2Go#001"(2019), he considered architecture as something between "immovable property" and "movable property" and imagined a "semi-movable property architecture" where people can choose where to live without being bound by the land. With "Takigahara Chicken Village" (2021), he envisioned an animal welfare society where humans and animals can lead happy lives together.

What would happen if the architect's authorship became "absent?" Yoshimura asks this question through this exhibition, using his work as reference material to further advance his exploration of the extensibility of architecture in today's society.
In this exhibition, seven of Yoshimura's projects are depicted as seven different stories by different manga artists to explore new interpretations of architecture. The world of manga has developed in a particularly unique way among two-dimensional pictorial expressions and has become a familiar part of our daily lives. What is depicted when manga and architecture meet and architecture leaves the architect's hands? We invite everyone to discover what the collaboration of architecture and manga will create.