ART FAIR
Design Miami 2025
Kekkai: The Space Between
December 2 – 7, 2025
Booth G01
Convention Center Drive & 19th Street, Miami Beach
We are delighted to present Kekkai: The Space Between at Design Miami, December 2-7, 2025. The exhibition investigates the Japanese concept of kekkai—a boundary, threshold, or interface. Rather than a mere division, we explore it as a critical site of interaction: a porous plane where materials, forms, and ideas encounter one another, creating a dynamic and transformative dialogue.
The curated selection of works examines the tangible and conceptual boundaries that structure our experience: between nature and artifice, tradition and innovation, solid and void. Featuring an international roster of Japanese and European artists, including Agnes Husz, KAKU, Kan Yasuda, Ken Matsubara, Kenta Hirai, Kodai Ujiie, Laura de Santillana, Lee Jae Hyo, Masahiro Maeda, Midori Tsukada, Mitsukuni Misaki, Shihoko Fukumoto, Ymer & Malta, and Yukiya Izumita.
Through a masterful and conscious engagement with materiality, each piece acts as a contemporary kekkai, framing the profound and poetic moments that occur in the liminal space where one state transitions to another. In response to a world saturated with noise and information, this exhibition constructs a necessary domain for contemplation, the essential “space between”. The collection invites a closer look at the boundaries—both visible and implied—that define, separate, and ultimately, connect.
To learn more, click here.
Kan Yasuda: Forms of the Unconscious
November 13, 2025 – January 17, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 13 from 5–8pm (kindly RSVP)
Artist talk | Kan Yasuda x Giorgio Angeli x Hitomi Iwasaki: November 18 from 5:30–7:30pm (kindly RSVP)
We are proud to present Forms of the Unconscious, a significant solo exhibition of new and iconic works by renowned Japanese sculptor Kan Yasuda. Opening on November 13th, 2025 through January 17, 2026, this marks the artist’s highly anticipated return to New York for his first solo presentation in over ten years, offering a rare opportunity to experience his serene and monumental sculptures at the gallery’s new flagship in Tribeca – the most vibrant art district in New York City. In celebration of Yasuda’s receipt of the 2025 Isamu Noguchi Award, Ippodo Gallery welcomes the artist alongside longtime maestro di bottega Giorgio Angeli for an artist talk on November 18, 2025.
Kan Yasuda (b. 1945) creates sculptures that innately explore the unconscious by pushing the extent of masonry—and physical motions of his own body—to express and challenge the limits of stubborn materials. The line between the individual and nature is blurred, and space becomes changed by a magnetic presence. Yasuda awakens a dormant energy within the marble that has accumulated over eons. After emerging from the mountain, quarry-cut raw stone in hand, Yasuda guides the shape beyond form—listening, touching, looking—until millennia of time is revealed layer-by-layer: the effect evokes the feeling of a dream. His sculptures call out to be touched and examined, while their minimalist perfection and interplay of tension describe a profound way of being.
A foremost contemporary sculptor, Yasudabegan working with Carrara marble in the early 1970s following his studies at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts in Japan and Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. For over fifty years, Yasuda has collaborated with stonemason Giorgio Angeli in Pietrasanta, Italy, and maintains a studio in Hokkaido, Japan. The most notable works of his early period are a series of monumental marble and bronze sculptures that memorialize the memory of souls lost to natural disasters, connecting the past, present, and future. In 1992, Yasuda created the Art Piazza Bibai in his hometown, which was awarded the prestigious architectural Togo Murano prize in 2002. His grand sculptures have exhibited widely in Europe—often on much-traversed paths where the human touch becomes an integral element—in the United Kingdom (1995), Florence (2000), Tokyo (2001), Assisi (2005), Rome (2007), and Pietrasanta (2005, 2025), among others.
Kan Yasuda has been recognized in both Japan and Italy for his exceptional work; he earned the International Award for Sculpture (1994), Order of the Star of the Italian Solidarity (2006), Lifetime Achievement Award of Hokkaido (2015), the Architectural Institute of Japan Culture Award (2020), and more. We commemorate the artist’s first award in the Americas by recounting Isamu Noguchi’s For Kan Yasuda written in 1985, “When I was last in Italy at Giorgio Angeli’s workshop, where both Kan and I work, I saw a recent sculpture of his which I thought…transcends art.” The Isamu Noguchi Award (2025) is a culmination of Yasuda’s six decade-long career and honors the history of the two sculptors’ inspiring journeys.
Kindly RSVP for the opening reception by signing up on the online form here.
To learn more, click here.
RECENT TALK
Image courtesy of Nicola Gnesi
Artist talk: Kan Yasuda x Giorgio Angeli x Hitomi Iwasaki
Tuesday, November 18, 2025 from 5:30–7:30pm
Kindly RSVP
We are delighted to welcome the artist Kan Yasuda, who will travel to New York to celebrate his receipt of the 2025 Isamu Noguchi Award and to commence his New York solo exhibition at Ippodo Gallery. The artist’s longtime maestro di bottega Giorgio Angeli, whose stone cutting skills are of paramount importance to Yasuda’s process, joins him from Pietrasanta, Italy, to discuss the creation of Yasuda’s artworks in stone and bronze, and recount their shared history of fifty years. Hitomi Iwasaki, the Head Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Noguchi Museum, will moderate the conversation.
Please note that this event is approaching capacity, kindly contact the gallery to join the waitlist.
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.
