Superposition Gallery Highlights Greg Ito at Frieze LA 2026: A Cautionary Tale

For his presentation with Superposition Gallery at Frieze LA 2026, Greg Ito offers an enveloping meditation shaped by closeness—of place, lineage, and lived experience. A fourth-generation Japanese American who grew up near the fair’s Los Angeles site, Ito returns to the city as both subject and setting, drawing perceptively from inherited stories that continue to shape his present. His work centers on an heirloom object from his family home—a vintage black trunk inscribed with his great-grandfather’s initials—that once held his family’s possessions during their forced removal and incarceration in World War II. Through this and other personal artifacts, Ito explores how objects act as conduits for inherited experience, carrying the echoes of displacement, care, and survival.

Through intimate keepsakes and subtle acts of preservation, Ito traces how memory circulates—fragile yet enduring—across time and generations. These works convey a sense of tenderness and gravity, blurring the boundaries between personal archive and shared history. Ito generously took the time to speak to Whitewall about planting something deeply hopeful in a world full of uncertainty, the emotional resonance of participation, and the countless reasons to keep moving forward. 

WHITEWALL: “A Cautionary Tale” begins with a precious object that has lived alongside you for most of your life. How did revisiting something so meaningful and familiar open new emotional or conceptual territory in your work?

GREG ITO: I grew up with this large, heavy, black, luggage trunk in my living room for my entire life. For years, I didn’t really know what it was, not until I was a young adult and began asking questions about my family’s past. The case is rarely opened. It mostly just sits there, a quiet and constant presence of what was carried before by my elders. On top of it are small framed family photographs, arranged in a way like flowers growing from a raised garden bed; memory taking root above something closed.

Now that I’m a father, and my daughter just turned five this February, I find myself holding onto the small things she treasures: rocks from our walks, tiny sculpted forms she makes from clay. These objects become imbued with energy, they carry the imprint of moments I want to protect. Recently, my parents returned a few boxes filled with my own childhood knickknacks, the contents of old drawers accumulated over time. Going through them now, I’m confronted with questions about what we keep, what we carry, and what we inevitably have to let go of.

Revisiting the trunk and these returned fragments of my own childhood, opened a space in the work that feels less about nostalgia and more about stewardship. About how memory lives inside objects. About how we inherit, preserve, and eventually pass things on.

Trauma, Continuity, and Rebuilding

WW: You’ve spoken about parallels between your family’s experience of forced incarceration during World War II and the recent pandemic. How did these distinct moments of trauma and upheaval shape your thinking around loss, rebuilding, and what we choose to hold onto?

GI: My family’s incarceration is a story often told in my practice, how my grandparents and great-grandparents were removed from their homes and sent to camps for years. I’m two generations removed from that experience, so I carry it more as an echo in my consciousness like a lesson passed down from my elders rather than something I lived firsthand.

One of the most meaningful truths to emerge from that terrible time is that it was in the camps that my maternal grandparents fell in love. If it weren’t for that period of upheaval, my family and many other families might not exist as they do today. That idea has always stayed with me: that even within uncertainty and loss, something life-giving can take root.

“Even within uncertainty and loss, something life-giving can take root.”

Greg Ito

I found myself thinking about this deeply during the pandemic. I had just opened a major exhibition that, within weeks, was overshadowed by the world shutting down. Fear was everywhere. It was surreal to watch everything pause, to be confined to the small home I shared with my newly wedded wife, wondering what tomorrow would look like.

And yet, during that same time, my wife and I began our family. Our daughter entered the world in the midst of global uncertainty. I don’t think we would have chosen to have a child then if the world hadn’t slowed us down, if we hadn’t been held in place long enough to listen to what mattered. While everything outside felt suspended, we were planting something deeply hopeful inside our home.

When I think about being in that world full of fear and darkness, questioning how and why we would start a family at that time, I look to my grandparents’ experience. They didn’t let the camps stop them from growing. I’ll never forget that. Sometimes, it’s during the hardest times that new things take root.

That’s how my daughter got her name, Spring. She was a bright sprout of energy in a dark season, a reminder that renewal can arrive in the most unexpected circumstances.

These histories have shaped how I think about loss and rebuilding. They’ve taught me that while structures can collapse and certainty can disappear, what we choose to hold onto is often relational: love, connection, the courage to begin again. Sometimes the most enduring thing we carry forward is the life that insists on growing anyway.

Color, Space, and Heightened Awareness

WW: The booth’s visual intensity is immediate and unmistakable. How do color and spatial decisions operate emotionally for you within this narrative of vigilance and remembrance?

GI: When I was developing the concept for the booth, I wanted to disrupt the grid of the fair itself. The repetition of stark white walls, bright lights, and an endless range of forms and images competing for attention. That grid feels neutral on the surface, but it also creates a kind of visual numbness.

For this presentation, I intentionally broke that rhythm by pairing red and yellow, two colors that operate subconsciously as signals of caution and alert. They’re the colors of warning signs, of heat, of safety markers. I wanted the booth to pull you in the way a flame draws a moth, not passively, but urgently.

The color becomes emotional architecture. It heightens your awareness before you even begin reading the work. It suggests that something is at stake. That what you’re encountering isn’t static. That things are never as they are forever, change is inevitable, sometimes within our control, sometimes far beyond it.

By intensifying the space, I’m asking viewers to be present with the storytelling inside it, stories about shared experience, human psychology, about the conditions we inherit and the ones we impose on ourselves. The visual charge is a way of sharpening attention, creating a heightened state where vigilance and remembrance feel embodied rather than abstract.

It’s not just about being seen in the fair, it’s about creating a space where people feel awake and connected to a state of existence and survival.

Opening Suitcases, Opening Memory

WW: Visitors are invited to physically remove and open select suitcases, discovering paintings and personal objects inside. What does this act of participation reveal about the intimacy—and fragility—of memory for you?

GI: On one side of the booth, there’s a large sculptural installation composed of vintage luggage trunks and suitcases, all painted a bright vermilion red. They’re stacked and ascending, like a staircase leading to another plane. They feel both grounded and in motion, vessels in ascension.

Embedded within this accumulation are six smaller suitcases that function as individual sculptural works. These can be removed and opened. Inside, you’ll find mirrored, colored plexiglass structures that create small infinity chambers—intimate portals where personal objects are suspended in time. Some of the cases also contain small paintings that correspond to the objects within, creating a dialogue between image and artifact.

The objects themselves range from loose change and miniature doll furniture to childhood keepsakes returned to me by my parents. There are small forms my daughter has made and gifted to me. Rocks are a recurring presence, stones from my grandmother’s garden, pieces from my own childhood collection, and rocks my daughter picks up on walks and presses into my hand like treasure. One suitcase holds seashells I’ve collected since I was a child, recently returned to me, carrying the weight of years. They’re almost like miniature installations, private worlds that can be opened, held, and contemplated.

By inviting visitors to physically engage with the suitcases, I’m asking them to perform a gentle act of trust. To open something that feels personal. Memory, for me, is both durable and fragile, and can be material too. It can survive generations, yet it can also be misplaced, boxed up, or forgotten. The act of opening the case mirrors the act of remembering, it requires intention and inner reflection. And once opened, you’re confronted with how small and tender the things are that hold so much emotional weight. Participation makes that intimacy palpable. It turns the viewer into a witness, and briefly, a caretaker of someone else’s memories.

Fatherhood, Time, and Inheritance

WW: Many of the objects included, from childhood rock collections to artworks made with your daughter, collapse past and present into a single moment. How has fatherhood reshaped your relationship to inheritance, history, and time within your practice?

GI: Growing up, I was always a collector of things, a pack rat of sorts. I’ve always had this nostalgic and sentimental connection to objects. Holding something in my hand, knowing its origin, feels like a time machine. It transports me back to the emotional state of that moment, the energy flowing through me and to me. There’s something magical in how our minds can anchor memory to the physical world.

As a child, I would hear my parents repeat stories about me over and over, to the point where it became unbearable when they told them to a new girlfriend. I remember thinking, please, not again! And now, as a father, I’m living a similar cycle with my daughter, Spring. I’m making new stories, small moments that I’ll tell over and over until she can’t stand it anymore. Experiencing these generational loops, seeing them echo and fold across time, is endlessly fascinating.

“Experiencing these generational loops, seeing them echo and fold across time, is endlessly fascinating.”

Greg Ito

Fatherhood has opened doors to ways of experiencing the world I never could have imagined. I’ve learned so much about myself, my environment, and what family truly means. These days, I hesitate to even call it “work”, my art practice is inseparable from family life. The time I spend with my family informs every decision I make in the studio. I even moved to a large studio where my family and I make art together. My wife Karen has her creative space upstairs, and both Spring and I have studio areas downstairs in the warehouse. The deeper I create, the more deeply I live with my loved ones. And I want my work to continue pushing me toward closer connections with them, to live in this intersection of memory, inheritance, and shared experience.

Specific Histories, Shared Experience

WW: While this project is deeply rooted in your Japanese American family history, you’ve described it as reflecting a broader human experience of uncertainty and belonging. How do you harmonize specificity and universality in your work?

GI: All my work is connected to my Japanese American family and its history, that’s who I am. I can’t separate myself from that identity. But I use the unique lore, the mythologies, and the stories within my family history as a way to reach the wider human experience. Almost every family lineage on this planet has faced hardship or tragedy that forced transformation. That testing of perseverance, the challenge of overcoming, that’s universal.

Life is about maintaining the light within yourself, even in a world that can feel so dark. And that light exists in everyone in different forms, some bright, some dim, some lost. We’re all connected. Life is always uncertain, but we all belong to one large, intertwined story of existence.

In my work, I distill imagery into simple, flat, symbolic forms, sometimes hieroglyphic in style. This allows people of all ages and backgrounds to access the work, to enter the experience I construct. My goal is for these objects, images, and installations to become points of connection. To me, those moments of shared recognition and understanding are the most meaningful. That is why I do what I do, and why it continues to feel so special.

Collaboration and Movement

WW: This project unfolds within a gallery structure that closely aligns with your focus on displacement and movement. How did collaborating with Storm Ascher and Superposition Gallery shape the way this project evolved for Frieze Los Angeles?

GI: Over a year ago, in December 2024, I made the decision to leave the gallery that previously represented me. Their values no longer aligned with the studio, and I realized my vision for what my art could be was far larger and more expansive than the container they provided. Leaving was the best decision I could make for myself and my family, and over the past year has been extremely transformative. It reminded me that growth requires movement, momentum, and the courage to take steps toward the place you truly want to be. It also reminded me that uncertainty is part of the process, sometimes all you can do is believe in yourself and your purpose.

I had told myself that I wanted to show this concept in some way during Frieze this year. Originally, I was planning to do it off-site, but then, through what felt like perfect timing, my good friend Storm Ascher, whom I’ve known for years, gave me a surprise call. She asked if I wanted to participate with Frieze this year. In that exact moment, the booth fully appeared in my mind, like a clear visualization projected into my imagination. I was driving on the freeway past downtown Los Angeles, the city lights sparkling behind me, when she asked. And I knew: yes.

The ideas rooted in the luggage trunk concept aligned so seamlessly with Storm’s nomadic curatorial vision at Superposition Gallery that it felt like two puzzle pieces fitting together in an infinite box of possibilities. Since the studio is independent and Storm doesn’t represent artists in a traditional sense, this collaboration allowed us to focus purely on creativity and meaning, rather than commercial pressures. It felt authentic, expansive, and deeply resonant.

I’m incredibly grateful that these pieces connected so beautifully, and I’m thrilled to finally share what we’ve been working on. It’s been a collaboration built on trust, shared vision, and the belief that art can transform both space and experience.

What Lingers Afterward

WW: Many of your works balance visual warmth with a sense of unease. What draws you to that emotional friction, and what do you hope lingers with viewers once they step away from the work?

GI: The precariousness of life is something we can never escape. Just getting in a car in the morning carries unknown risks; we never fully know what might be around the next corner. And while we greet people with “How are you?” the answer is almost always, “I’m good, thank you.” But we’re never purely “good.” There are always battles, struggles, and unseen layers in everyone’s life.

I aim to strip away that veil of complacency and confront these feelings head-on, the impermanence, the losses, the cycles of life: grandparents passing, children growing, parents stepping into new roles. My work strives to be real. I’m not here to paint pretty pictures or tell you that everything will be okay. But I do want to show that hope exists if you allow it, that positive change is possible if you keep taking the steps toward the life you want. And, ultimately, that we are never truly alone.

Even on days that feel like you’re at the bottom of a million-foot-deep hole, if you open your eyes, you’ll see you’re surrounded by others facing the same struggles. Together, we can climb, celebrate, and honor the hardships that shape us.

“Together, we can climb, celebrate, and honor the hardships that shape us.”

Greg Ito

When people walk away from my exhibitions, I hope the work leaves a subtle imprint. A memory that shapes the way they see and interact with the world. I hope it reminds them to dream big, to pursue their goals, and also to cherish small, quiet moments, like a pebble kept in a pocket, gifted by a loved one on a long walk. In a world full of fear, greed, hate, and loss, there are countless reasons to keep moving forward. The challenge is finding the one that matters most to you.