Nina Johnson is pleased to present The Tongue is the Child of the Heart, Megumi Shauna Arai’s debut solo exhibition in Miami. Featuring Arai’s latest works, the exhibition centers on silk as a living material—handled, dyed, folded, stitched, and painted—as a site of movement, transformation, and energetic transference. The exhibition title draws from a well-known proverb in Traditional Chinese Medicine, referring to the energetic anatomy of qigong: a mind–body practice devoted to cultivating the free-flow of vital energy, or qi. Invested in the connective space between material process and embodied practice, Arai’s ongoing qigong discipline—particularly her intensive work with the heart—deeply informs this body of work. The exhibition pairs new silk works with Arai’s latest film project, a two-channel video created in collaboration with choreographer, movement artist, and renowned qigong teacher Daria Faïn, to create a unified space of attunement.
In Chinese metaphysics, the historical character for “heart” (xin 心) is shared with the word for “mind,” and is often translated as “heart-mind.” Rather than adhering to a mind–body split, the heart is understood as the holistic seat of emotion, cognition, and spiritual experience, as well as the central node of qi. This integrated model of feeling and thought offers an alternative to the separations that structure modern Western epistemologies. For Arai, the heart becomes emblematic of a larger cosmology—one defined by continuity, interrelation, and enfolding.
A self-taught artist, Arai is driven by interdisciplinary approaches and experimental material practices that give rise to a distinct visual language. Her folded silk works appear suspended in motion, drawing on early textile studies and the qualities of emotion, animism, and character attributed to fabric in its depictions throughout art history. Each silk fragment is meticulously hand-painted, composed, folded, and stitched, forming gestural, suspended shapes, as if they have just been tossed into the air or billowing in the path of descent. The textile works become activated, spirited, and transformed with the endowment of kinetic energy, sewn with joyful improvisation. Their warm, lustrous tones and fluid washes of paint reference the blood as the carrier of qi, pumped through the fiery heart. A layered visual poetics emerges between the delicacy of silk and the body’s fascia, the thin fibrous tissue that envelops and connects the body’s musculature and organs. Created in a horizontal orientation with a collapse of foreground and background for the first time, these works propose the fold as a metaphor for an interconnected cosmos and a nonlinear orientation to space-time, in which past, present, and future are enfolded and compressed. The abstraction of silk thus becomes one of Arai’s many movement modalities—a medium for articulating alternative universal conditions beyond rigid chronologies.
In her silk relief works, Arai applies water-based paint and oil pigment to stretched silk in dynamic strokes derived from the heart-focused qigong instruction of Daria Faïn. Through repeated observation of filmed practice, Arai tracks and abstracts core physical gestures, translating them into patterned forms that operate as a visual language of qi in motion. In Chinese metaphysics, the tongue and the heart are understood to be connected through a central meridian; as vessels, they become conduits for qi and carriers of transformation only through emptiness. For Arai, this clearing— of both body and material—allows communication to traverse the self. Pliancy becomes the ground of sustained vitality and will. Distilled into a geometric vocabulary, the painted silk works offer a symbolic notation linking mouth and heart, their deep, saturated tones suggesting a chromatics of energy—vital and life-giving.
These painted forms reappear in the gestures of Daria Faïn in the two-channel film knowing how, filmed between Chiba Prefecture, Japan and New York City, in which Faïn gently gathers and guides the flow of qi. Split across two projections, the video reflects a parallelism foundational to Chinese textual traditions, in which paired ideas function as tools for oral transmission and invocations for thinking. Rather than offering resolutions, this structure places two differing images side by side, directing the viewer toward intuitive insight. Through the juxtaposition of oppositional visuals, the film activates perception and challenges conditioned associations, inviting a relational thinking that might blossom into sudden understanding. Fortified with these images, the viewer must move forward along their own interpretive path.
The Tongue is the Child of the Heart brings together the overlapping aesthetic and metaphysical frameworks that continue to shape Arai’s practice across media and technique. Through their material poetics, the works on view propose a way of seeing and being—rooted in the interdependence of tongue, heart, hand, and mind.
When something takes charge (ren 任) of the beings, we speak of the heart (xin 心) When the heart applies (yi 憶) itself, we speak of intent (yi 意) When intent becomes permanent, we speak of will (zhi 志) When the persevering will changes, we speak of thought (si 思) When thought extends itself powerfully and far we think of reflection, when reflection can have all beings at its disposal we speak of knowing how.
— Lingshu, Chapter 8, Rochat de la Vallée, 2012
The Tongue is the Child of the Heart will be on view in our Upstairs Gallery through April 4th, 2026.
Words by Sofia Thiệu D’Amico
