The entryway evokes a calm energy with a scarce number of objects. Untitled RL032 by Ko Kirk Yamahira hangs above an Ekstrem chair. A curvaceous vase is placed on the Italia travertine table with a black Alvar Aalto stool. An Ettore doorstop by Magis can be spotted in the corner.

The Frye Art Museum in Seattle has added four new works to its collection. The acquisition is part of a two-year partnership with the Seattle Art Fair, which awarded the institution a total of $50,000 in support of the expansion of its contemporary art holdings. “We are again grateful to the Seattle Art Fair for the opportunity to broaden and diversify the Frye’s contemporary collection with works by this extraordinary group of artists, said museum director and CEO Joseph Rosa.

From the fair’s fifth edition, which was presented by AIG, the institution purchased works from four Pacific Northwest galleries, including a work-on-paper by Jeffry Mitchell (PDX CONTEMPORARY ART), a multimedia piece by Ko Kirk Yamahira (Russo Lee Gallery), a drawing by Mary Ann Peters (James Harris Gallery) and a painting by Anthony White (Greg Kucera Gallery).

I would have chosen a mix of realist, painterly paintings and textural or textile abstract wall works. Erik Hall’s dreamily-rendered Cypress tree at Hall-Spassov Gallery and Gloria De Arcangelis’ pensive Muse at Woodside/Braseth Gallery, both of Seattle, are expert examples of the former. Look to Evan Nesbit’s bright yellow burlap with paint squishing through the weave at James Harris Gallery (also of Seattle) and Ko Kirk Yamahira’s canvas where the center has been unwoven, leaving the strands to bow hammock-like in the center at Portland’s Russo Lee for the latter.

Obsessively meticulous and labor-intensive in their construction, borderline perverse in their fetishization of process and materials, Ko Kirk Yamahira’s mixed-media constructions push painting into the realm of the sculptural. The works begin as color-field paintings or silkscreens, but they don’t stay in that form for long. The Seattle-based artist uses an X-acto blade and scissors to unweave portions, or the entirety, of each canvas, deconstructing the picture plane into an assortment of hanging threads and fuzzy nap.

Several window panes sprinkled with colorful shreds of canvas hang along the hall leading to Ko Kirk Yamahira, a self-titled exhibition at the Frye Art Museum. Yamahira, now a Seattle–based artist, has shown work across the United States and in Japan, founded the New York-based, Japanese artist collective Art Beasties in 2013, and exhibited as a member of SOIL. The current exhibition is his first solo effort in a museum context and presents a range of deconstructed forms, some made specifically for the Frye.

In his first solo museum exhibition, Yamahira builds beautifully on this minimalist-modernist legacy with deadpan reverence and delicate sensuality. The show, on view through June 3 at the Frye Art Museum, is named after him, although his is not yet a household name. Born in LA and raised in Tokyo and London, the young, self-taught artist moved to Seattle from New York less than three years ago.