Heated Colors, Hammered Forms: Female Metal Artists of Japan: Asia Week New York 2023

Location: Onishi Gallery, 521 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

NEW YORK, N.Y. — February 2023: Chelsea gallery owner Nana Onishi has made it her mission to introduce New York audiences to the art crafts of contemporary Japan, today known collectively as “kogei,” a word coined 140 years ago to translate the English “craft.” Just recently, Onishi’s efforts have received a major boost from Japanese officials, curators, and professional associations, who are repurposing “kogei” to promote the exceptional nature of Japan’s heritage of traditional hand-working skills and processes.  

Onishi Gallery’s latest exhibition, held to mark this year’s Asia Week New York (March 16–24), is Heated Colors, Hammered Forms: Female Metal Artists of Japan, turning the spotlight on the contribution made by women to an aspect of kogei that was formerly a male preserve, closely associated with the world of the samurai. Although metals are especially hard to handle, shape, and decorate, the five featured artists have each devoted a lifetime to the medium, using it produce masterpieces that are every bit as expressive and beautiful as work in less obstinate materials such as clay or textile. 

Fashioning gold, silver, copper, and its alloys with a range of techniques including casting, chiseling, hammering, and overlay, the artists share an uncompromising passion for traditional skills and materials combined with a spirit of creative innovation, two qualities that exemplify the contemporary spirit of kogei. Through patience, passion, and sheer hard work, they submit metals to their artistic wills, forming objects of an unparalleled grace and elegance that win viewers over at first sight. 

Oshiyama Motoko creates swirling, agitated surfaces by welding together two or more different metals such as silver or shakudō, Japan’s unique blue-black alloy of copper and gold. Ōtsuki Masako chisels fine angled lines to give her work an eye-catching three-dimensional look, rich in depth and shadow. Okamoto Yoshiko uses the hagiawase technique, making intricate, colorful patterns by forging and welding alloys of different colors, including copper, silver, shakudō, and shibuichi—a gray-green alloy of copper and silver—to create surfaces that can evoke water shimmering in the breeze, or leaves dappled by sunlight. Although Hagino Noriko is also known for her colorful pieces in hagiawase technique, for this exhibition she has worked with nanryō, highly refined silver, wielding her hammer to conjure up different tones, shades, and textures from a single metal. Living National Treasure Ōsumi Yukie shapes her vessel forms through an arduous hammering process, then beats metal leaf into a fine grid incised into their surfaces, fashioning designs evocative of wind, waves, and clouds. She writes that “metals can substitute the permanent for the fleeting and transitory, conferring eternity on phenomena that would otherwise have a limited lifespan.” 

Onishi hopes that both seasoned collectors and newcomers to the world of kogei will appreciate the passion, care, and creativity that each of the five artists has devoted to this magical process of “substituting the permanent for the fleeting.” Looking to the future, she also sees the exhibition as a major step toward a longer-term goal of establishing major collections of kogei in America’s leading museums. 

Thanks to the generosity of a Japanese donor, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is already home to a large group of masterpieces of contemporary metalwork including several by artists in Heated Colors, Hammered Forms. Onishi now plans to improve global appreciation of kogei by establishing a US-based network of curators, scholars, collectors, and dealers with a passion for kogei and a determination to secure a prosperous future for Japan’s hardworking, creative kogei artists. 

For more information or appointments, please email nana@onishigallery.com or call 1.212.695.8035.