Lines of memory, drawn in time — Joan Jonas’s quiet reflections

Written by Saori Takeda, publisher of ART Driven Tokyo

In Joan Jonas’s world,drawings an echo —of memory, movement, and myth.

From May 17 to June 28, 2025, PACE Tokyo, located in Azabudai Hills, will host a landmark exhibition of works on paper by the legendary American artist Joan Jonas. Titled Joan Jonas: Drawings curated by Adam Pendleton, the show offers a profound lens into Jonas’s lesser-known, yet deeply essential, drawing practice—and her decades-long conversation with Japan. The curator is Adam Pendleton, an artist and longtime friend of Jonas.

Jonas, born in New York in 1936, stands among the foundational figures of video and performance art. She emerged from the downtown New York scene of the 1960s and ’70s, a milieu charged with the energies of Cage, Rauschenberg, Forti, and Trisha Brown. Her works layer video, performance, installation, sound, text, and sculpture. Yet amidst all this, drawing remained her quiet constant.

This Tokyo exhibition marks a return—not just for Jonas, but for her work’s cyclical resonance with Japanese culture. Her first trip to Japan was in 1970. Since then, Japan has been a steady companion in her art and life. She got the Kyoto Prize in 2019.

The exhibition at Pace brings together approximately 80 drawings, many created during or inspired by her time in Japan. Animal imagery—a hallmark of Jonas’s visual vocabulary—also plays a central role. Her rabbit drawings echo the Japanese myth of the moon-dwelling hare. These images anticipate her video installation Double Lunar Rabbit (2010), to be featured in the forthcoming “Prism of the Real: Making Art in Japan 1989–2010” at the National Art Center Tokyo this September.

Other works in the show include expressive blue-ink drawings of fish, inspired by a Japanese dictionary she discovered serendipitously in San Diego.

Pendleton’s curatorial hand is subtle but significant—this is not merely a retrospective of drawings, but a meditation on how Jonas’s visual language continues to evolve and respond to place and memory. That the curator is also a long-time friend adds another layer of intimacy: the exhibition feels not unlike a dialogue between two artists across generations, time zones, and media.

In a city and a season primed for renewal, this exhibition invites us to consider how we mark time—not just with images, but with movement, memory, and myth made visible.

Exhibition Details

Title: Joan Jonas: Drawings Curated by Adam Pendleton

Period: May 17 – June 28, 2025

Venue: Pace Tokyo
1F; Azabudai Hills Garden Plaza-A
5-8-1 Toranomon, Minato-ku Tokyo

Website: https://www.pacegallery.com/exhibitions/joan-jonas-drawings/