Main artwork

The Big Flat Now

📍 BONUS TRACK （Parking）

Emoji emerged from Japanese mobile-phone culture in 1999 and have since become a universal visual language. The “Face with Tears of Joy,” once the world’s most widely used emoji, was named Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year in 2015 and has repeatedly appeared in Matsuda’s work.

Yet the way emoji are used continues to shift across generations, and in 2025 the “Loudly Crying Face” became the most widely used emoji on social media. Today, it conveys not only sadness, but also feelings such as “laughing too hard,” “I can’t,” and “this is too precious.”

This exhibition premieres a new “Loudly Crying Face” that reflects this shift. By bringing the multiple emotions layered within a single symbol out into the nighttime city, the work reconsiders the boundaries between digital and physical, information and matter, emotion and the body. Just as people once looked up at the same moon, we now look at the same emoji across national borders.

And, recalling how the moon and the night have long been associated with revealing another side of ourselves, the “Devil” emoji also makes its first appearance as another face of Shimokitazawa—a neighborhood whose character changes between day and night.