Kazuhiro Kanda & Yu Sugimoto exhibition

After taking a break last year, Kanda returns this year for a two-person exhibition with Sugimoto.

To reintroduce Kanda, his work centers on calligraphy and carved lettering, and he also creates artists’ seals for many of the artists familiar to visitors of our gallery, as well as signs for Japanese restaurants and other establishments. Both our gallery seal shown in this catalogue and the sign hanging outside our gallery are works by Kanda ♡

My own knowledge of calligraphy and carved lettering goes little beyond seeing them in museums, but I have never encountered anyone other than Kanda who incorporates ceramics into this kind of work. Working with materials of completely different qualities presents technical challenges in areas such as forming, as well as the difficulty of creating harmony between different materials, yet he handles these challenges beautifully and transforms them into finished works of art. Carved lettering tends to have a strong sense of tension that seems to sharpen the atmosphere around it, but when ceramics are incorporated, the feeling somehow becomes softer and more relaxed. It is quite mysterious.

I believe Kanda’s great love of ceramics, fishing, and cooking also has a significant influence on his work. Sugimoto, meanwhile, will mainly present Shigaraki and kohiki works, although the latter are not pictured here, along with new pieces using straw-ash and wood-ash glazes. He had apparently been aiming for a completely different atmosphere with these new ash-glazed works, but the result is pottery with an elegant kiln transformation that seems as though it could belong to Takatori ware, yet somehow does not. For Sugimoto, whose work has centered largely on the strongly rustic character of Shigaraki, these pieces promise to reveal an enjoyable new side of his practice.

The exhibition will bring together carved-lettering works in a variety of sizes, alongside tea ware, flower vessels, sake ware, and tableware. We feel that the works of these two artists complement each other exceptionally well. We hope you will come and see them for yourself.