Inaugural Exhibition at Our New Location
March 2025
35 N Moore Street, NYC
We warmly invite you to the grand opening of our new flagship location in New York’s historic TriBeCa district this March, beginning a new chapter in the gallery’s history as a leading bridge to Japanese kogei art since 2008.
The 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 from March 13 to April 17, 2025.
We look forward to welcoming you soon!
UPCOMING ASIA WEEK NEW YORK EXHIBITION
Light and Abundance: Gold in Japanese Art
March 13 – April 17, 2025
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 13, 5-8pm
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.
