Youth find a bridge to Bangladesh in Yokohama

 
 
For young Bangladeshis growing up between cultures, artist Kamrul Hasan Lipu's first solo exhibition in Yokohama offers a vivid meditation on roots, memory and identity. Titled DOT: The Beginning of Everything, the exhibition opened at Gallery Shimizu on 20 October and runs until 25 October.

Lipu, who has lived in Japan for years, turns childhood memories and Bengali folk imagery into a visual language of his own. Women's faces, water lilies, sari motifs and the red and green of Bangladesh recur across 41 works, creating a quiet dialogue between homeland and adopted home.

Its central metaphor is deceptively simple: a dot becomes a line, a line becomes form, and form becomes the world. For younger viewers navigating an increasingly borderless world, that progression carries particular resonance, suggesting that identity, too, is shaped from seemingly small beginnings.

Water lilies recall Lipu's childhood, when an eight-year-old artist won third prize after drawing them with borrowed coloured pencils. His works also evoke Old Dhaka's rooftops, kites and folk traditions.