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Concurrent Exhibition: The Way of Paintings FACE2025 Award Winners

“The Way of Paintings” is a group exhibition in which four artists, one Grand Prix Award recipient and three Excellent Work Awards recipients from the FACE public entry competition, each present approximately 5-10 new or recent works in their respective sections of the Sompo Museum of Art. Since FACE was established in 2012, this exhibition has been held every three years as an independent show featuring 12 award recipients, but, beginning with this edition, we have changed the format to be a special invitational presentation within the FACE exhibition venue for the four most recent award recipients.
The first edition to adopt this new format, The Way of Paintings 2026, introduces Saito Dai, winner of the FACE2025 Grand Prix Award; and Kasuga Kaho, Huang Yuqi, and Takeuchi Miki, recipients of the Excellent Work Awards.
With this change in format, we hope that The Way of Paintings will offer visitors, including FACE applicants, an opportunity to more deeply engage with the creativity of the previous year’s awardees. At the same time, we hope that the approximately 10-month preparation period will be a fruitful time for the invited artists.
FACE is a public entry competition for two-dimensional works in any technique or medium. Moreover, as the word “way” in the title “The Way of Paintings” suggests an open direction, the works shown in The Way of Paintings are not strictly confined to “painting” in the narrow sense. In these artists’ results we hope you will feel and sense both the sensibilities of our times and new developments in painting.