project N 104: Tanaka Ai

Tanaka Ai paints with mineral pigment so coarse that a brush won't spread it. To make a line she has to place the grains side by side, and when she mixes two colours they soon separate again, so some hues are nearly impossible to lay down evenly. The gallery's curator reads her grids and diagonals as a diary of that struggle with the material.

Trained in nihonga, she turned to abstraction because, she has said, painting what she saw always ended up being about her own point of view. Here she hung large paintings far apart along the 4th-floor corridor, so you see them one at a time as you walk its length. After the passageways of Shinjuku Station, this is a corridor where walking slowly is the point.

There is no separate ticket: the show comes with Seeds and Roots (¥1,800, students ¥1,100, junior high age and under free). Last entry 18:30; closed Mondays except 23 November, and on 24 November.