From March 13, 2026, LAID BUG will present a solo exhibition by Naomi Nakazato.

Naomi Nakazato, a Japanese American artist currently based in Brooklyn, New York, has previously exhibited at Below Grand (2022 / New York), LVL3 (2023 / Chicago), Zona Maco (2023 / Mexico City), and Olympia (2024 / New York). In addition to these presentations, she has actively participated in numerous group exhibitions primarily throughout the United States.

Through her practice, Naomi explores memory, language, and the complex perspectives that arise from her experience as a biracial individual. Treating everything as a “flow of information,” she segments and recombines elements in ways that unsettle assumptions about what appears “authentic” or “natural.” Working across various media, she proposes alternative ways of seeing, inviting viewers to question what constitutes “authenticity” and what it means to be “oneself.”

This exhibition, her first solo presentation in Japan, features works developed from what Naomi describes as a “dual pilgrimage” undertaken in 2025, when she visited Japan and traveled along the Kumano Kodo. This dual pilgrimage consists of a physical journey made on foot and a virtual journey navigated through Google Street View. By layering photographs taken on site with screenshots from Google Street View, she deliberately blurs the boundary between direct experience and mediated observation. Furthermore, by employing systems that identify location-based information—such as QR codes and what3words—she examines how memory becomes structured, fragmented, and increasingly unstable as one moves between physical and digital terrains.

In addition to printed works, the exhibition includes lightbox pieces incorporating silicone skins cast directly from trees encountered along the Kumano Kodo. As suggested by the exhibition title, each work functions like a “save point” in a video game—a site where experience is temporarily recorded in the midst of an ongoing journey. Compressed within the works are the tactile sensations of physical touch, digitally captured views, and mechanically transferred traces—what might be described as the “texture of encounter.” The resulting images emerge not as a continuous archive of memory, but rather as a series of checkpoints that can be revisited later. What may initially appear to be documentation instead reveals itself as a record of process—evidence of where perception paused, stored itself, and resumed again from a slightly altered position.