Sai Hashizume’s paintings are characterized by precision and meticulously depicted themes concerning contemporary women and intimate items of clothing and shoes. She began her After Image series, her versions of paintings by traditional Western masters such as Botticelli and Caravaggio, when she returned to Japan after about five years in Europe. This exhibition takes its name from Hashizume’s Girls Start the Riot (2010-2011), a central painting in this series. In this work, three girls, whose faces are unseen, have unabashedly entered a Cézanne still-life scene. Hashizume selects the word ‘riot’ to describe their audacity and her intention is clearly to resist the traditions and authority of Western painting, while at the same time breathing new life and a contemporary sensibility into them. The exhibition introduces Hashizume’s painting Girls Start the Riot, a kind of declaration of her purpose, and works from the After Image series it launched.