Yoshida Chizuko (Japanese, 1924–2017), Jama Masjid, 1960, color woodblock print on paper, The Vivian and Gordon Gilkey Graphic Arts Collection. Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon, 83.57.222. © Yoshida Chizuko

Asia Week New York is excited to welcome the Portland Art Museum (PAM) to our network of world-class institutions! Founded in 1892 in Portland, Oregon, PAM is the only major art museum between Seattle and San Francisco, showcasing artists from the Pacific Northwest and beyond. A vital cultural and educational hub, the Museum is internationally recognized for its special exhibitions and encyclopedic collection, connecting audiences with the arts and the ideas shaping our world. PAM is currently transforming its campus, adding 100,000 square feet of new and upgraded gallery and public spaces, and will unveil their expansion on November 20, 2025. Until then, explore their newly opened exhibition, Yoshida Chizuko, now on view in the main building, along with its accompanying program!

Yoshida Chizuko
September 27, 2025 – January 4, 2026

This is the first major museum retrospective to focus on the groundbreaking 20th-century painter and printmaker Yoshida Chizuko (1924–2017), a pioneering woman modernist in Japan. Yoshida Chizuko features over 100 works, many of which have never previously been exhibited, encompassing early oil paintings, rare monotypes, woodblock prints, lithographs, and zinc-plate mixed media prints, in addition to archival material and ephemera. Many works in the exhibition comprise a major planned acquisition from the Yoshida family estate, joining the Museum’s exceptional holdings of 20th-century Japanese prints that are among the most significant in the country.

Yoshida Chizuko traces the evolution of the artist’s full career, from avant-garde abstraction in the late 1940s and 1950s to illusionistic op art and neon-colored photoetchings in the 1960s and 1970s, to her late career, which was heavily influenced by the natural world. The exhibition situates her within the context of international modernist art and 20th-century Japanese printmaking, a medium that experienced enormous global popularity in the postwar era. The presentation also explores the tensions inherent in Chizuko’s role as a woman artist in mid-century Japan and as a member of the well-known Yoshida family into which she married, with a tradition of artistry spanning four generations into the present day. Works on view illustrate the personal influences that shaped Chizuko’s work, including the loss of a beloved brother, formative years as a member of the artist Okamoto Tarō’s radical Night Society collective, and the later interplay between Chizuko’s work and that of her husband, Hodaka.

Yoshida Chizuko is accompanied by a range of public programs including a daylong symposium on October 25, offering expanded context for the exhibition and for Yoshida Chizuko’s work during her lifetime. In addition, the Museum offers visitors a free audio guide on the Bloomberg Connects app featuring commentary by curator Jeannie Kenmotsu, guest scholars, and the artist’s daughter Ayomi Yoshida. The guide will reflect on Chizuko’s six-decade career with personal stories, historical context, and artistic insights. It will offer visitors a deeper connection to Yoshida’s journey as a pioneering woman modernist in Japan.

Forthcoming in 2026, the Yoshida Chizuko catalogue will feature essays by exhibition curator Jeannie Kenmotsu; Noriko Kuwahara, Retired Professor at Seitoku University, Chiba, Japan; Hollis Goodall, Retired Curator of Japanese Art at Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Ayomi Yoshida, the artist’s daughter and practicing contemporary artist.

To learn more, click here.

Yoshida Chizuko (Japanese, 1924–2017), Outskirts of Town (detail), 1950, oil on canvas, 46 x 35 13/16 inches, Courtesy Estate of Yoshida Chizuko. Image courtesy Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon, L2025.4.

Rediscovering Yoshida Chizuko: A Symposium
The Mildred Schnitzer Memorial Program in Asian Art for 2025
October 25, 2025 from 9am-4pm
Fields Sunken Ballroom, Mark Building (1st Floor)
Tickets: $25 Non-members; $12 Members & Students with ID

In this daylong event, scholars, curators, and an artist will explore ideas introduced in the Yoshida Chizuko exhibition and offer an expanded context for her work. Speakers will discuss the inspirations that shaped Chizuko’s practice as well as her art and legacy in the historiography of modern Japanese art. Other topics include gender, postwar oil painting, twentieth-century printmaking, and the Yoshida family of artists.

Symposium registration includes free museum admission Saturday + Sunday, morning coffee with registration, and the concluding reception.

To learn more and view all details, click here.

Asa Hiramatsu, Seesaw <07>, 2025, oil on canvas, 44.1 x 63.8 in (112 x 162 cm)

Seizan Gallery proudly presents AWAI, a captivating group exhibition showcasing the strikingly distinct visions of Marina Berio, Aya Fujioka, and Asa Hiramatsu. Join them for the artists’ opening and artist talks next week to experience their work firsthand—and don’t miss Asako Tabata: Waiting for Bones, closing Saturday, October 18, a hauntingly poetic exhibition not to be missed!

AWAI
Marina Berio, Aya Fujioka, Asa Hiramatsu
October 23 – December 20, 2025
Opening Reception with Artists: Thursday, October 23, 6-8pm
Artist Gallery Talk: Saturday, October 25, 2-4pm 

Awai is a classical Japanese term signifying an in-between realm or liminal space where two entities meet, overlap, or interact. It evokes the subtle boundary between dualities—light and shadow, self and other, reality and dream. This group exhibition brings together three distinguished artists, Marina Berio, Aya Fujioka, and Asa Hiramatsu, each working in a distinct medium, to explore and embody the delicate and polysemous notion of Awai.

Marina Berio presents a series of charcoal drawings (2007–2012) that reimagine photographic negatives of landscapes and studios, where light and shadow invert to evoke themes of loss, doubt, and ambivalence. She also debuts three new gum bichromate prints—created with unconventional pigments, including her own blood—that transform family photographs into intimate meditations on memory and the body.

Photographer Aya Fujioka presents selected works from LIFE STUDIES, her newly published series with AKAAKA in Kyoto, capturing fleeting moments of New York life from the late 2000s to 2010s. Influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, her photographs blur the line between the personal and the collective—quiet reflections of her own struggles that become universal meditations on urban existence and human connection.

Self-taught painter Asa Hiramatsu makes her U.S. debut with six new canvases characterized by textured, muted surfaces built through tactile, hand-applied oil paint. Evoking dreamlike stillness, her works transform personal memories and inner visions into quiet explorations of balance and being—where imagination and reality, presence and absence, gently converge.

Join them in celebrating the opening with the artists on Thursday, October 23, from 6-8pm, and return for a gallery talk on Saturday, October 25, from 2-4pm, moderated by Pauline Vermare, the Philip and Edith Leonian Curator of Photography at the Brooklyn Museum.

To learn more, click here.

Installation view, Asako Tabata: Waiting for Bones

Asako Tabata: Waiting for Bones
Closing Saturday, October 18, 2025

Don’t miss your last chance to see Asako Tabata: Waiting for Bones at Seizan Gallery—on view through Saturday, October 18. Experience Tabata’s hauntingly poetic works before the exhibition closes soon!

To learn more, click here.

Yogambara and Jnanadakini, Samphel Rinpoche Ling, late 14th century, Gyantse, Central Tibet. Photo by Rémi Chaix

The Rubin Museum Distinguished Lecture in Himalayan Art
A Forgotten Milestone in Tibetan Art: The Murals of Gyantse Dzong’s Temple
Friday, October 17, 2025, 6-7pm
The Met Fifth Avenue,  Bonnie J. Sacerdote Lecture Hall, Ruth and Harold D. Uris Center for Education

Discover the murals of Gyantse Dzong’s Temple at the second annual Rubin Museum Distinguished Lecture in Himalayan Art—a lecture series supported by the Rubin and hosted at The Met that presents expert insights into the greater Himalayan region’s art, cultures, and history, fostering deeper connections with these rich traditions.

Built in 1390, the temple of Samphel Rinpoche Ling at Gyantse in central Tibet was erected as the private chapel of the princess of Gyantse. It preserves a remarkable series of contemporary murals rich in detailed iconographic programs. Join scholar Kunsang Namgyal-Lama, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales and Centre d’Études Sud-Asiatiques et Himalayennes, Paris, to explore these rare survivors of late 14th-century painting, featuring a variety of Newar and Chinese-influenced styles, and discover new insights into 14th–15th century Tibetan painting history.

Priority will be given to those who register. Space is limited; first come, first served.

To learn more and register, click here.

Installation view, Koichiro Isezaki: Clay in Flow

Koichiro Isezaki: Clay in Flow
Closing Saturday, October 11, 2025
35 N Moore Street, NYC

Don’t miss Koichiro Isezaki: Clay in Flow, an exquisite solo exhibition at Ippodo Gallery, before it closes! The show features 50 of the celebrated Bizen ceramicist’s works, including his iconic Yō (‘conception’) series, alongside chawan (tea bowls), mizusashi (water jars), and hanaire (flower vases). Hailing from generations of Bizen artists who preserved stores of the precious regional Okayama clay, Isezaki creates work that flows along the currents of tradition with a contemporary language entirely his own. 

Isezaki contemplates the origins of tsuchi (‘earth’) as the distinctly wet, fine, and nebarike (‘viscous’) clay comes into his hands. Bizen-yaki, one of Japan’s Six Ancient Kilns, is cultivated by centuries of masters, among them the artist’s grandfather Yozan—a leading 20th century sculptor—and his father Jun, the current Living National Treasure.

Though Bizen styles vary, all ceramics from the region are fired in the anagama tunnel-kiln for ten-or-more-day periods, which is fed with cut logs every quarter hour to maintain an intense fire. Koichiro Isezaki’s perspective is an accumulation of history left behind in the clay by his forebearers. He cares deeply for the local history of the earth and its unique properties therein.

Isezaki begins a new creation by pulverizing blocks of hardened clay from the family cache, which he then reconstitutes as mud blocks. Once he pugs the clay to refine its impurities, he takes the shape produced by the machine as his starting point to slump, shape, or otherwise manipulate. Isezaki has established signature and distinct forms: he throws the damon and pulse vases against ridged stone to cast shapes in the surface of the clay. He molds tea bowls by hand and then cuts them with wire to create sharp, bold faces that recapitulate the classic bowl. Finally, he models the Yō sculptures—inspired by the appearance of a pregnant woman—from large clay cylinders into rolls and folds as if sculpted by the rise and fall of a gentle breath.

The merit of Isezaki’s works was recognized in 2022 when he was awarded the prestigious top prize by the Japan Ceramic Society, and his work is in the public collection of the National Crafts Museum, Kanazawa. Glenn Adamson—curator, writer and historian who previously served as Director of the Museum of Arts and Design and Head of Research at the V&A—contributed his essay, “Slow Dance: Kōichiro Isezaki” to commemorate the exhibition.

Be sure to experience these sublime pieces soon!

To learn more, click here.

Zoom Webinar
The Transpacific Connection: Ceramic Influences between Japan and the United States
Online

Joan B Mirviss LTD is delighted to announce that the recording of their well-received Zoom panel that took place on Tuesday, September 30 is already available for viewing online. Their celebrated and dynamic speakers, all senior ceramists, were shaped by time spent in both Japan and the United States, countries with distinct approaches to clay art. This “Transpacific Connection” is discussed in depth both on professional and personal bases. Each man reflects on the role that each of these environments played in fostering their remarkable careers.

They hope that you enjoy this rather special, lively, and informative discussion!

Panelists:
JUN KANEKO, artist
SUZUKI GORŌ, artist
RICHARD BRESNAHAN, artist and educator
REE KANEKO, arts administrator, consultant, and curator

Moderated by Joan Mirviss

To watch, click here.

Korean Ceramics: The Scholar’s Vision, The Photographer’s Eye by Yangmo Chung, Heakyum Kim, Bohnchang Koo, 2025, Hali Publications Limited

We are thrilled to share that one of our own Asia Week New York members, Heakyum Kim, director of HK Art and Antiques LLC in New York City, has just released a new publication: Korean Ceramics: The Scholar’s Vision, The Photographer’s Eye.

This remarkable book explores the contemporary significance of Korean Joseon dynasty porcelain, renowned for its beguiling minimalism. At its core, the book presents a dialogue between Yangmo Chung, expert scholar and former director of the Korean National Museum, and contemporary artist Bohnchang Koo. Their subject is Joseon dynasty white and blue-and-white porcelain—masterpieces now housed in museums around the world, celebrated for their striking minimalism. Bohnchang Koo’s sensitive photographic portraits of the vessels meet Yangmo Chung’s insightful commentary, providing a unique and nuanced perspective on Korean ceramics.

International interest in Korean art and culture has grown dramatically in the past decade, yet English-language literature on traditional Korean art forms remains limited. This publication is a timely resource for an English-speaking audience, combining rigorous art-historical scholarship with aesthetic interpretation. It explores the contemporary relevance of a classical porcelain tradition that flourished for over five centuries.

To learn more, click here.