“The Best of Toyama: Kōgei Art and Design from Japan” Exhibition
Onishi Gallery
This event has ended.
Onishi Gallery presents The Best of Toyama Kōgei Art and Design From Japan, the second collaboration with Toyama Prefecture. The spectacular first exhibition in 2014 was the inauguration of the gallery’s cross-cultural program, My Japanese Discoveries. The goal is to introduce the international world to the unique creative and historic traditions of lesser-known prefectures in Japan. Supported by the Japanese government, the first exhibition offered highlights of Japanese heritage and arts, as well as opportunities for social exchange between artists and attendees, including local Toyama food and drink tastings in the gallery. Toyama Prefecture has nurtured art, craft, and industrial traditions for over 400 years, and in this groundbreaking second collaborative exhibition, Onishi Gallery features five artists and eleven companies from Toyama who represent over four centuries of creative development. In particular, these sixteen artists and companies embody kōgei [工芸]—work made by artists or artisans, which can be considered art and commercial product. This hybrid category synthesizes two processes, two forms, and two kinds of makers, blurring the line between past tradition and present discovery, self and society, and memory and imagination. The pieces in this exhibition showcase the beauty in this union.
Japan has 47 prefectures, each with its own distinctive art, food, and culture. Visitors often travel to Tokyo, Osaka, or Kyoto due to their accessibility rather than to the more remote prefectures such as Toyama. Overlooked by most tourists, Toyama is located in the Hokuriku region on the coast of the Sea of Japan (northwest area of Honshu island), and is characterized by a stunning, rugged landscape of steep mountains, lush, rolling plains, and the pure Kurobe River that cuts the deepest gorge in Japan. Sustained by both long-standing traditions and emerging innovations, Toyama is an applicant for UNESCO World Heritage status and a premier player on the Sea of Japan coastline. Onishi Gallery’s partnership with prefectures, like Toyama, enables individuals to experience distant and perhaps little known cultures through exhibition of their art and craftwork, which are inseparable from their history and tradition.
From the culturally rich Toyama Prefecture, the five artists featured in this exhibition stunningly demonstrate local Toyama traditions in metal and lacquer.
Media
Schedule
from May 14, 2015 to May 20, 2015
Opening Reception on 2015-05-15 from 18:00 to 20:00