Shinjuku-sanchome, Tokyo. A minute’s walk from the station exit, at the contemporary art space biscuit gallery, there was an exhibition open for four days only.
Shine On! Art Exhibition: Beyond 20 Years. A charity exhibition organised in 2026 by Shine On! Kids, a certified NPO that has supported children facing childhood cancer and other serious illnesses, together with their families, to mark its twentieth anniversary. The venue was biscuit gallery (Shinjuku, Tokyo); the show ran from Wednesday 29 July to Saturday 1 August, and admission was free.
What lined the walls of the gallery were paintings with the dog as their motif — an exhibition of new work by ten emerging artists.
Ten artists, ten different dogs
The theme given to the artists was “a scene with a dog.” Oil painting, relief, ceramics. In some works the dog is the protagonist, faced head-on; in others it dissolves into the scene as one part of a room.
Small works were hung with generous space between them, an arrangement that makes you stop at one piece at a time. Together with a four-day run and no opening reception, this was a show that chose showing each work singly over any kind of bustle.
Ayano Tamuro’s A Room with Plants and a Dog is an interior scene in which a blue-and-white porcelain jar and houseplants run riot across a surface of 910 × 727 mm. The dog sits almost at the centre of the picture, yet is not painted as its subject. It is there as part of the room, at the same density as the plants and the patterns.
At the right end of the same corner is Yume Aoyama’s Shippo no Sumika (“a home for tails”). Quilted fabric swells into the shape of a house. A red cross sits on the gabled roof, and dogs peer out of the windows below it — a “house with dogs” that rises up with the touch of bedding still in it. The materials are polyester fabric with oil, acrylic and board.
Installation view.
Placed on the floor were ceramics by Minami Yoshida. In Tokete Yuku Kimi to (“with you, melting away”), both outline and coat are beginning to melt, and the dog looks barely able to stand on its four legs. Mofumofu to Taiyo (“the fluffy one and the sun”) sits at its feet, the two pieces forming a single scene.
The ten participating artists were Yume Aoyama, Kato, Kanna Takase, Katsuharu Tano, Ayano Tamuro, Saori Nagata, Yulala Mori, Miyu Yamada, Takuya Yoshida and Minami Yoshida. All the works were on sale as well as on view, and the proceeds were donated to Shine On! Kids.
Bailey — the first facility dog in Japan
The one work that stood out for its size was this pale pink painting. In addition to the ten artists, Rikako Kawauchi also exhibited.
A seated dog is drawn in nothing but red line, and scattered around it are the six letters B, A, I, L, E, Y — plus a single bone. The title is Bailey.
Bailey is the name of the first Hospital Facility Dog in Japan.
What a Hospital Facility Dog does
Hospital Facility Dog® is a registered trademark of Shine On! Kids. Unlike therapy dogs, who visit facilities as volunteers, a facility dog is paired with a dedicated handler and works “full-time” at one particular hospital.
Bailey began working at Shizuoka Children’s Hospital with handler Yuko Morita on 1 July 2010. That date was later registered as “Facility Dog Day.”
Dogs drawn by children
The opposite wall was covered with drawings sent in by children who have been hospitalised and by their siblings, gathered through an open call.
A drawing with a dog’s name written large across it. A drawing in which a square that looks like a bed sits next to a dog. A drawing of a dog in a blue vest. The blue vest is what facility dogs wear in hospital, and you realise that for these children, the shape of a dog begins with that vest. Each drawing carried a caption, exactly as the artists’ works did.
Two paintings by Annie and Ivy
Ivy × Mayuko Ohashi (handler) and Annie × Yuko Morita (handler). Both are from 2020, in acrylic. In the attribution, the dog’s name comes first. Yuko Morita, whose name stands alongside Annie’s, was also Bailey’s handler.
The caption in the gallery read as follows.
These works were created for the crowdfunding campaign held in 2020. They are special pieces painted by the facility dogs Annie and Ivy together with their handlers. They hold the trust built between dog and handler, and the warm wishes sent to children facing illness.
Beside the works, a small photograph from the making was posted: Annie lying on a mat on the floor, with her handler holding up the finished painting next to her.
Shine On! Kids also runs other programmes, among them Beads of Courage®, which records each step of treatment by turning it into a bead, and Shine On! Connections, which links children who are undergoing treatment.
Opening day: a 100 × 120 cm canvas, painted by everyone
On 29 July, the opening day, a workshop was held in the gallery. With the cooperation of ArtBar, which has long run workshops for children, staff led the session while around ten children spent some two hours painting a single canvas of 100 × 120 cm together.
Vinyl sheeting on the floor, water-based acrylics squeezed out, and then simply painting, on and on. Two hours on the premise that hands and clothes will get dirty.
This is what came out of it. Stars and flowers fill the surface, and over them, a single dog in black line. The star is also the symbol of Shine On! Kids.
Beyond 20 years
The run was four days. The whole of the opening afternoon was given over to the children’s time to make.
“Beyond 20 Years” … sixteen years since Bailey began working at a hospital, twenty years as an organisation. For the twenty years that come next, this was four days in which paintings of dogs were gathered together, all at once.
