Yukiko Suto's drawings of plants and flowers, many in pots or planters or small gardens around typical suburban houses, are probably the most unassuming works in the exhibition. Suto's unpopulated scenes strike us as totally commonplace, and, except for an occasional sprinkling of watercolor, are made up entirely of pencil lines. Rendered in exacting detail, they almost seem to have been traced from a photograph until we realize that standard artistic touches like shading and perspective have been omitted to create a flat (but for some reason more realistic) view of the world. Strangely, this lack of visual depth enhances the works' emotional resonance, giving them a wistful quality, and gradually the utter ordinariness of the scenes makes it seem as if something more must be lurking in the background.

Though Sai Hashizume's paintings bear almost no resemblance to Suto's works, they share a photographic exactitude, all the more so in Hashizume's case due to the whitish glow of artificial light that pours from her pictures and the palpably sensual depiction of the female body. Chloris (2012), used in posters and fliers for the exhibition, shows the bottom half of a woman's face twisted upward toward the right with a pink flower sprouting from her open mouth. Her shoulders are bare, and as in many of Hashizume's works there is a distinctly erotic air. The title is derived from the name of the Greek goddess of vegetation, and the image seems to be a direct reference to this line by Ovid: "As she talks, her lips breathe spring roses: I was Chloris, who am now called Flora."

Koji Tanada's sculptures are among the most striking works in the show. Carved out of a single piece of timber and connected to a base that was part of the same tree, Tanada's painted human figures are all young and terribly undernourished, their rib cages poking through a thin veneer of skin. When they have arms, they are long and spindly; when they are clothed, the clothes are another part of their bodies; and when they have their hair, it fits tightly to their heads like a cap or hood. Their invariably vacant looks are belied by alert eyes angled upward or off to the side, conveying a mood of youthful anxiety and doubt.

Hideaki Shibata and Kazuya Matsunaga, collectively known as Yodogawa Technique, troll the Yodo (a major river running from Lake Biwa to Osaka Bay) for garbage, which they use to make art. The group's principal exhibit here, Let's Become Garbage!, a huge wall of discarded and broken objects like helmets, buckets, shoes, soap containers, and hand fans, was assembled with the help of dozens of volunteers. It is not a pretty sight, especially when we realize that nearly every inch of it is plastic and a regular part of our daily lives. As the title suggests, the work also allows us to reunite with all of these things we thought we had gotten rid of by inserting our faces in one of several holes in the wall and having our picture taken. Positioned at the end of the exhibition, it leaves us with the disturbing thought that old yellow Crocs and blue trashcan lids have replaced daffodils and nightingales as objects of nostalgia and fantasy in the contemporary age.