Ulterior Gallery is pleased to present Pidgingo-no-Inko, the fourth solo exhibition by Gaku Tsutaja. A Japanese artist based in New York, Tsutaja reinterprets historical trauma and established narratives through a contemporary lens. The exhibition opens on September 5, 2025. The opening reception will take place on Friday, September 5, from 5 to 8 pm.

The exhibition title, Pidgingo-no-Inko (Pidgingo’s parakeet) is also the title of the new video sculpture installation featured in the show. “Pidgingo” refers both to “pidgin language” and “after pidgin” (“go” meaning “language” and “after” in Japanese). The parakeet—an evolving character in Tsutaja’s work for nearly a decade—functions as both a metaphor for immigrants who mimic language and a satirical figure that reflects the repetition of history. More broadly, “pidgin” denotes a contact language that naturally arises between local populations and foreign traders to enable communication.

The video installation Pidgingo-no-Inko, will be presented alongside the two- and three-dimensional works that appear within it. In the video, the conversations are in English, but the names of countries, events, and places are rendered in a mixture of Japanese and local languages, mimicking how pidgin functions. The narrative unfolds through three voices: a child, a man, and an elderly woman. Rooted in the intimate setting of the family—the smallest unit of community in human society—this constellation also echoes Tsutaja’s own family structure in the United States. She interweaves histories of war, colonization, and weapons development with fragments of personal anecdotes, weaving a nonlinear narrative that merges reality and fantasy. In doing so, she explores overlapping symbols and dialogues across time and space, seeking to dismantle fixed frameworks of thought and to invent a new pidgin language within her work.

The video is projected from a large sculptural structure resembling a human head, finished with ears made using traditional Japanese dry-lacquer techniques. Within this structure are miscellaneous elements: broken eggshells, tiny birds, an empty rib cage, and a monstrous black spider spreading its limbs in the center. Conceived as a planning model by the imaginary parakeets, the structure allegorically seeks to reorder histories of mass violence. These symbolic forms also reflect on the information technology industry and censorship—how information enters and exits our attention, and the skeletal systems through which it is monitored. Tsutaja draws inspiration from the overwhelming speed and volume of information circulating on social media, as well as from the simultaneous rise of voices from historically oppressed peoples and their interconnected struggles.

What do we see, what do we fail to recognize, what traps us, and what do we endlessly repeat—both historically and in the present? Tsutaja’s work urges us to examine modes of communication, confront systemic violence, and engage collectively with the recurring patterns of human history.