This spring, Richmond Art Gallery presents a major exhibition from April 18–July 5, 2026 titled SIDE CORE: under city by Japanese art collective SIDE CORE.
The exhibition gives us a rare look into Japan’s skate and street culture. The artists were inspired to create their multi-channel video installation rode work ver. under city due to the gentrification that was being seen around Tokyo ahead of the 2020 Olympics. Despite skateboarding becoming an Olympic sport for the first time ever at this edition of the Olympics games, at the same time street skating was being restricted on the city’s surface.
Skaters were thus forced to explore new sites of expression in subterranean spaces like stormwater basins and train tunnels. For multi-channel video installation, SIDE CORE collaborated with renowned skate film crew Far East Skate Network to create a work that links these various isolated structures into a speculative, virtual undercity.
In this exhibition that will be Japanese art collective SIDE CORE’s North American debut, viewers are also invited to reflect on similarities between the two cities of Richmond and Tokyo: both share similar geological conditions of being built on reclaimed land and are connected culturally/historically despite being on different sides of the Pacific Ocean.
Ahead of the official opening, the artists of SIDE CORE will be holding a Lulu Series talk event on the evening of Thursday April 16 to dive more into urban Japanese skate culture and how it served as an inspiration for this work and their artistic practice in general.
Learn more about the exhibition here.
