NYAB Event - Shigeru Uchida "Hako"

Shigeru Uchida "Hako"

Ippodo Gallery

This event has ended.

“Box” is the title of this second exhibition of Shigeru Uchida, the designer of ”Po-an,” Ippodo Gallery’s tea room space in New York. Uchida has explored Japan’s fundamental aesthetic sense of space in a unique cultural anthropological way—Fudo-ron (an essential relationship between climate and other environmental factors and the nature of human cultures) and etymology. This led to a re-statement of Japan’s tradition of the beauty of everyday-life in the language of contemporary interior design. From of old, based on the Buddhist philosophy of “emptiness,” Japanese have always been cognizant of the significance of a “box,” the most minimal of spaces, and have made utensils such as letter boxes or cases for outdoor tea ceremonies or used them as home altars such as Shinto shrines and Buddhist altars, continuously refining their uses by stacking, joining and combining them in new ways.
Uchida often quotes the words of Tenshin Okakura, “Cha no yu (the Tea Ceremony) is a ritual that worships the beautiful things that exist in daily life.” By making “boxes” the theme of a gallery exhibition, he has made these ultimately simple utensils into a symbol of the pure mind and added them to the roster of Japanese traditional beauty. To appreciate this tradition of minimalist beauty, one must view it from the perspective of “wabi”, the spiritual aesthetic of the imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete, rather than that of the extravagance that underlies the samurai aesthetic.

At the “Boxes Exhibition,” models of private homes and Japanese-style rooms designed by Uchida will also be on display. In addition, in conjunction with the Opening of “Box,” Uchida will deliver a lecture entitled, “The Design of Weakness” at the Pratt Institute (History and Theory of Design) and at Parsons (The New School of Design, School of Constructed Environments).

Media

• Architecture
• Furniture
• Product

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