UPCOMING EXHIBITION
Craft Garden: Landscape of Japanese Art
May 15 – June 28, 2025
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 15, 5-8pm
We are pleased to present Craft Garden: Landscape of Japanese Art featuring around twenty living artists who envision the philosophy of the Japanese garden in ceramics, lacquer, bamboo & plant fibers, glass, metal, wood, and painting this spring.
The Japanese garden, amongst the pond, trees, rocks, and moss, is a place to discover the fundamental attitude of coexistence between nature and humans. In the face of common natural disasters, this relationship defines the harmonious, yet resilient, Japanese lifestyle. Classical architecture such as the sitting veranda engawa connects inside and outside spaces. There is a closeness to nature; at a low viewing angle, aromas are most fragrant, shadows create beautiful vignettes, and sounds of the river current are peaceful. From this vantage, the sensory experience draws focus to craftsmanship where a glaze holds an entire cosmos.
The passage of time and change of the four seasons transpire with imperfection. A unique character emerges with appreciation for decay, weathering, asymmetry, or the ‘kiln-effect.’ The inextricable link between fine art craft and the garden is articulated as the transient wabi-sabi aesthetic; these artists exemplify this through different approaches.
Hiromi Itabashi’s uniquely minimalist expression of Zen ‘nothingness’ brings to the surface a spirit from within the ceramic. Agnes Husz strips clay to its raw materiality; stretching the slabs out into belts like the obi sash. From the series chosen as a 2025 LOEWE Craft Prize finalist, “Tomeishi” Stop-Stone acts as a marker delineating where the relationship between environment and human crosses into the sacred. Kenta Hirai—trained in technique by Irish woodworker Joseph Walsh—bends Yoshino cedar wood into a streamlined form without need for joinery; the organic qualities and colors of the Nara-native tree remain pristine. Hafu Matsumoto uses the natural warp and grain of the bamboo for his noshitake technique; cut strips are bent and rubbed into the basket shape with hot water. Brothers Yui and Kai Tsujimura contribute the beauty of Japan’s most traditional Shigaraki and Iga kiln styles; the bounty of the mountainside is embedded within the local origins of clay, ash, and firewood. Takashi Tomo-oka gives order to the chaos contained in a single organism teeming with life; bug bites, withered petals, and new blooms are captured in a pure state. Shigeru Uchida’s ‘Ji-an’ Teahouse of woven bamboo serves as an anchor that gives purpose to the garden.
We welcome you to experience the unique cultural viewpoint of today’s master craftsmanship.
To learn more, click here.
RECENT ASIA WEEK NEW YORK EXHIBITION
Light and Abundance: Gold in Japanese Art
March 13 – April 17, 2025
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 13, 5-8pm (by RSVP only)
Asia Week Hours: March 13, 11am-7pm and March 14-21, 11am-6pm
We warmly invite you to the grand opening of our new flagship location in New York’s historic TriBeCa district this month, beginning a new chapter in the gallery’s history as a leading bridge to Japanese kogei art since 2008.
This inaugural exhibition, Light and Abundance: Gold in Japanese Art, coinciding with Asia Week New York celebrates the immutable beauty of gold featuring a group of fourteen master artists’ latest pieces in lacquer, metal, Nihonga painting, and ceramics.
The pure material, never to tarnish nor rust, is the object of fascination and admiration for more than a thousand years in Japan. Gold represents divinity, the eternal, and symbolizes spiritual enlightenment since ancient times, serving to cover statues of Buddha, temples like Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto, and the feudal lord Hideyoshi Toyotomi’s famous Gold Tea Room. Under shadows the gold leaf adorned folding byobu screen thrives; “in the darkness, where sunlight never penetrates, gold leaf will pick up a distant glimmer, then suddenly send forth an ethereal glow, a faint golden light like the horizon at sunset” (Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows). ‘Zipangu, the Land of Gold’ as Marco Polo named the archipelago more than five-hundred years ago, reminds how the country was once the foremost global producer of gold, which empowered the development of a distinct Japanese visual culture. While modern minimalist and wabisabi philosophies rise, flamboyance remains a quintessential element of Japanese aesthetics. Ippodo Gallery presents twenty-four top emerging Japanese artists in contemporary kogei for whom gold persists as a medium of innovation and virtue.
Rising star lacquer artist Terumasa Ikeda leads the tradition of raden inlay with mother-of-pearl and gold leaf towards the timeless. Each bejeweled box, tea caddy, and incense container is the thinnest Kiso hinoki wood enveloped in layers of brushed lacquer. The final hand-laid gold and mother-of-pearl sparkle with iridescence in patterns evocative of electronics and the extraterrestrial.
Noriyuki Furutani elevates the tea bowl to its most formal form as the works from his kiln singularly focus the tenmoku—perfectly rounded walls of equal height slanted outward, culminating in a sublime shaped lip. Golden glaze, his latest advancement, realizes the beauty of the play between light and ceramic. Hirotomi Maeda crafts by hand meticulous metalworks that incorporate ancient hand-beaten methods for molding sheets of pure gold and silver into forms of exceptional intricacy and function. The precious metals are inlaid with patterns in scintillating Japanese shibuichi alloy of gold, silver, and copper.
Painter Kaori Someya nurtures the deep and rich hues of mineral pigments with the nobility of gold; the rusticity of the powdered earth-based mediums made from precious ore, animal shells, and sumi charcoal set off the subtle details of her gilded figures. The light dances as it strikes the gold, textured washi paper, and voluptuous paints, giving animated life to the woman and kimono; this is her debut showcase at Ippodo Gallery.
To learn more, click here.
About the Gallery
Ippodo Gallery is a cultural bridge to Japan’s living master artists. Founded in Tokyo (1996-), the New York gallery (2008-) presents fine handcrafted and rare works created using traditional materials and methods. Each piece selected embodies Japanese aesthetic sensitivity that is born of a spiritual bond with nature. Ippodo’s exhibition program features unique objects — fine ceramics, lacquerware, metal crafts, sculpture, paintings, and works on paper — that celebrate human invention, the natural world, and sublime beauty.
