"Prime" at Tokyo Opera City is a magnificent demonstration of color, form and size. Sparse yet well displayed, this exhibition breathes freely and expressively in the high open space, which in Tokyo is a rare and valuable experience. Each artist is chosen to develop various aspects of curator Santo Oshima's intention to distill the "primal" fundamentals of art by concentrating on color and form.

Oshima is passionate about the show, having obviously spent many hours ruminating on the merits of the work and the individual expression of each particular artist he included. The exhibition glides among a variety of artistic styles and concerns, opening with the great abstract swaths of paint in Yuumi Domoto's work.

Domoto, 40, is already well known in Japan and hails from a famous lineage, her father being one of the most important abstract painters of the postwar period. After living and studying in the U.S., Domoto came back 10 years ago to take up the family mantle.

"One of the most important things about her work is the energy in her paintings that gives her work a heroic quality. I chose to open the show with these large paintings because of that," says Oshima, adding that Domoto has always done "orthodox abstract painting."

Her paintings sit well alongside Shiro Matsui's very modern, witty silicon/rubber composites of painting and sculpture. One is a lazy deflated funnel oozing onto the floor. The other, "Round Rectangle," is an impressive bright yellow 3-meter-wide sheet of silicon on canvas, hanging 6 meters from the ceiling and spilling onto the floor.

Matsui, 39, began using silicon and rubber from the mid-'90s and since then has been using it extensively, in smart, clear works that blur the boundary between sculpture and painting.

"Absolute simplicity is one of the key elements in his work," Oshima points out. "It is 3-D work, but totally simplified. The color is bright and vivid and the form is very simple, for example, rectangles and circles, and the volume is also minimized to 2-3 cm.

"Matsui is interested in the space and how it is transformed into something different with the intervention of his work. For example, by including this tube into the main body of 'Round Rectangle' he is adding space to this very thin form -- the tube also contains a certain amount of space. It is the sculptural element and it is also a really strange containment of space."

The second gallery is devoted to the cloudy paintings of Hidenori Majima, who uses traditional nihonga materials such as hemp paper and indigo as the basis of his work, and the action of water and crushed marble mixed with glue tilted this way and that over the surface of the mainly circular shapes to create the image. The result looks very much like clouds seen from space, hovering above a deep indigo sky.

Oshima says that Majima, who was also born in the early '60s, wants to avoid direct symbolism in his work and thus, categorization. They are neither traditional Japanese nihonga nor abstract paintings. As for being representative, "They are no more intended to be clouds than the rabbit we perceive in the clouds is a rabbit."

We moved from these glistening nonrepresentations onto the "hypersurrealistic" nature studies of Masakatsu Kondo's renderings of mountains and trees. But these too are not as representative as they might first appear, as Kondo, 38, himself explains.

"I use a photographic image, so people can access it easily, but I alter it -- the mountain is elongated, for example. I am not really interested in painting reality. Painting has to do something a bit more. I am interested in the ideal. For instance, when people think of a high mountain, deep sea, blue sky or whatever, they see an abstract image. That is what I am painting -- the imagined mountain or forest."

Similarly Chieko Oshie's simple, dreamy rendering of weeds growing in her suburb inspires us to contemplate our environment, or rather contemplate our inner experience of that environment. Shown in the last main gallery, these large paintings are soft and lovely. Oshie (at 31 the show's youngest artist) employs a limited palette of powdered pastels that she squeezes onto the canvas and presses in with her fingers. The canvas' threads can still easily be seen, giving the work an extremely light and watery, transparent glow.

The enormous copper sculpture by Noriaki Maeda, 39, is an exercise in form, and strangely enough for such a heavy work, in lightness and space too. As a sculptor he is very concerned with size and volume -- not exactly hot topics in sculpture these days, admits Oshima, but nevertheless the reason why this work is part of the show. The form changes as the viewer moves around the work, to incorporate the space of the gallery.

This show doesn't bow to the simple-minded kitsch of contemporary Japanese art (often presented internationally as sex-obsessed or manga-inspired); it is unusual in its particular lack of faddish conceits. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of the show is how the participating artists, all born in the 1960s, are returning to earlier struggles with abstraction, color, form and representation.