Ei Arakawa-Nash to Represent Japan at Venice Biennale With Care-Focused Pavilion
Ei Arakawa-Nash will represent Japan at the 2026 Venice Biennale with a project that turns caregiving into both a physical and political experience. Titled Grass Babies, Moon Babies, the installation will place more than 100 baby dolls throughout the Japan Pavilion, inviting visitors to carry them, tend to them, and move through the space as participants rather than spectators.
The dolls are designed to weigh roughly the same as newborn babies, giving the work a tactile immediacy. Visitors will encounter small acts of care, including changing a nappy, and will receive a short “oracular” poem generated from each doll’s birthday. Those birthdays correspond to historically significant dates connected to minority communities in and beyond Japan, linking intimate gestures to broader historical memory.
The project is rooted in Arakawa-Nash’s own life. In 2024, the artist and their partner became parents to twins through surrogacy, a development that helped shape the exhibition’s central focus on care. Arakawa-Nash, who was born in Fukushima Prefecture and now works internationally, has said the Japan Pavilion has not really addressed diaspora before. For that reason, they see the commission as a chance to foreground minority voices.
The installation will not stop at the pavilion’s walls. Arakawa-Nash plans to extend the work into the surrounding garden, emphasizing what they describe as the circulation between building and landscape. The title itself points to that relationship: “grass” for the outdoor setting, “moon” for time and emotion. The project also draws on Takamasa Yoshizaka’s original architectural design for the pavilion.
Grass Babies, Moon Babies also includes a collaboration with the Korean Pavilion, marking the first partnership of its kind between the two national pavilions in Biennale history. Beyond the exhibition itself, the project will unfold through artist-led crowdfunding, collaborations with designers and writers, and community partnerships in Venice.
Curators Lisa Horikawa and Mizuki Takahashi have framed the work as inherently collaborative, noting Arakawa-Nash’s interest in collective experience and the layered histories that shape the present. The artist has also pointed to precedents including Yayoi Kusama’s Narcissus Garden (1966), Rei Naito’s One Place on the Earth (1997), and Arata Isozaki’s Venice architecture exhibition in 1996.
The pavilion arrives in a political climate that gives the work added force. Japan remains relatively conservative on LGBTQ+ rights, with same-sex marriage still not legally recognized. In that context, Arakawa-Nash has said, the role of a queer parent becomes newly charged. The result is a pavilion that treats care not as sentiment, but as labor, structure, and public form.
