Shun Okada and Nick Lenker’s playful intervention of contemporary painting and ceramics pulls apart themes coded within the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)/ Family Computer (Famicon)—a 1980s platform that was more than just a Japanese video game console. First released in Japan in 1983 as the Famicon and later to the U.S. market as the NES, the NES reshaped American pop culture and laid the groundwork for how we understand games, childhood, entertainment, and technology today.

 

What emerges is a cross-Pacific conversation between two artists, unknowingly connected by a shared cultural moment. Through their work, they explore existential dread with the use of analog practices rooted in the art historical canon.

 

Shun Okada, a Tokyo-based painter, explores the visual language of NES–era aesthetics—particularly the glitches embedded within them—as metaphors for both internal and external dissonance. Influenced by the rich legacy of Western painting, he pays homage to Impressionist and Post-Impressionist techniques, meticulously constructing these digital malfunctions through horizontal brushstrokes laid down millimeter-by-millimeter. Subtle traces of glitch-like disturbances—mirroring earthquake tremors that occur as he paints—emerge as faint disruptions within his compositions, echoes of instability woven into his reality.

 

But it’s the digital nostalgia—expressed through geometric abstraction in Philadelphia–based Nick Lenker’s ceramic sculptures—that emerges from manipulated imagery sourced from NES-based games. These images are compiled and reconstructed in Photoshop, then printed onto ceramic decals reminiscent of clothing construction patterns and applied to his intricate, slab-built clay forms. With a sense of mechanical detachment, Lenker transcribes the immersive game worlds he once inhabited as a child and those digital worlds he occupies as an adult, reflecting on how virtual experiences shape our physical realities. His sculptures occupy a space that feels deliberately disconnected from both realms—yet defiantly present in each—formed by both but fully belonging to neither.

 

For all the virtual worlds that Okada and Lenker explore—Super Mario, Zelda, Kirby—games that are still culturally a part of children’s lives more than 40 years later, the world they cannot escape is the one that they inhabit. The “glitch” state that is so sharply captured within those games echoes through the many broken systems of our shared reality.  It's as if we’re all living within an unresolved error code—looping, crashing, trying to reboot, and caught within a simulation of our own making.