Hernan Bas has returned to Tokyo with 'TIME TO SHINE! (the salesmen)', his first solo exhibition in the city in eight years, on view at Perrotin Tokyo from September 9 through November 11. The Miami-born artist (b. 1978) devotes the new body of paintings to an unlikely cast of protagonists: young men selling wilted flowers, seashells, secondhand clothes, and personal possessions amid the makeshift theater of yard sales, florist stalls, and seaside souvenir stands.

Each encounter carries its own quiet drama. Works such as the monumental 'All You Ever Wanted to Know About 5B', 'Showmanship sells sugar', and 'He sells sea shells by the sea shore' stage the negotiations of gestures and goods between salesman and customer, while smaller moments — the miserly reduction offered by 'The prodigal son (3pm, farmers market)', the trade-off between candy and cavities in 'The tooth fairy' — accumulate into a meditation on value, labor, youth, time, and aging. Bas treats the much-maligned 'perfume model' who spritzes shoppers between entrance and escalator as a vanishing species, a paperboy with a bottle of Chanel N°5, and reads the whole mercantile world he paints as a contemporary vanitas.

The show follows Bas's institutional presentation 'The Visitors' at Ca' Pesaro in Venice earlier this year, alongside earlier solo exhibitions at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami (2023), the Rubell Museum (2020–22), and museums in Seoul, Shanghai, Málaga, and Savannah. The same body of work is simultaneously on view at Victoria Miro in London from September 17 to November 14, 2026, where the gallery is presenting the parallel edition of the series.