Host
Satoko Oe Contemporary
（Tokyo）
Established in 2016. The glass facade gallery aims to become the unforgettable space in the town/society. We work with the artists based in and out Japan.
Locations
Gallery Collaborations
GC01
Guest
At ACK 2026, Margot Samel and Satoko Oe Contemporary present a joint project by Kris Lemsalu and Shigeru Hasegawa.
Kris Lemsalu (b. 1985, Tallinn) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice continually evolves through ideas, forms, anecdotes, and personal histories. Moving between sculpture, installation, and performance, she blurs the division between life and art, often using ceramics to give bodily form to imagined characters and lived experience. Based between New York and Tallinn, Lemsalu represented Estonia at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. Selected institutional presentations include Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Moderna Museet, Belvedere 21, Kiasma, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Secession, and MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna. A solo exhibition opens at FC Francisco Carolinum, Linz, in November 2026.
At ACK, Lemsalu presents new ceramic sculptures fired in a traditional Japanese wood kiln, allowing ash and flame to shape their surfaces. She also presents a new work in ACK Intersections, curated by Leonhard Bartolomeus under the theme Out of Bounds.
Latently informed by Japanese ukiyo-e, yo-ga, and various Western painting traditions, Shigeru Hasegawa (b.1963, Shiga)’s idiosyncratic works feature a recurring cast of fruits, vegetables, fish, and other objects. Arranging them into formations against the picture plane, Hasegawa makes playfully concentrated paintings, executing each one with formal economy.
Receiving his art training in Japan, Germany, and Holland in the 1980s and 1990s, Hasegawa was exposed to a wide range of formative influences, which for the past two decades, he has diffused into his unusually fresh paint handling and surfaces.
His orchestration of objects in stacks and patterns thus take on a provisional and animated appearance, as if they could fall apart or rearrange themselves at will.
Such allusions to the transience of life, as memento mori and vanitas, abound in Hasegawa’s work.
A major solo exhibition “Paint-Tengu” will be held at Toyota Municipal Museum of Art from October 24 through January 24.
Guest
Margot Samel
（New York）
Margot Samel opened in Tribeca, New York, in May 2022. The gallery presents exhibitions by international artists at all stages of their careers, often marking their first presentations in New York. Originally from Estonia, Samel worked across galleries, museums, and artist run spaces in Glasgow and New York for over a decade before establishing her eponymous gallery. The inaugural exhibition featured Estonian multidisciplinary artist Kris Lemsalu (b. 1985, Tallinn), whose work combines sculpture, installation, and performance in ways that are both theatrical and materially direct, setting the tone for a program that embraces experimentation and collaboration across diverse practices. While maintaining a particular focus on artists from the Baltic region, the gallery also works with contemporary and historical artists from a broader international context. Margot Samel is committed to building long term relationships with artists across different stages of their careers, including those working outside traditional frameworks, and regularly collaborates with other galleries to support ambitious exhibitions and projects.
