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06.02.2025 - 06.04.2025
At Le Clézio Gallery, Paris, Aiko Miyanaga sublimates napthalene for her 1ᵉ solo exhibition in France.
Ever since she was a child, Aiko Miyanaga has observed wooden apple crates frozen in time in the absolute silence of her family's workshop. Having never dared touch them, in 2020 she decided to take a look, and discovered inside “rond de moules” (two-part Sèvres plaster molds) of heavy, white forms, of great complexity, suffering from numerous missing parts, but carefully arranged and labeled on which she read: “Rabbit, body incomplete”, “Sleeping tiger, tail”, or “Cat, no ears”.
Testifying to the years of painstaking work carried out by her father, brother and those who studied the Tozan Kiln (a type of traditional kiln used for ceramics), Aiko Miyanaga learns that these molds were made by her great-grandfather Tozan Miyanaga, one of the exhibition coordinators for the Japanese Pavilion at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, who collaborated with ceramist Numata Ichiga, the only Japanese sculptor studying at the Manufacture de Sèvres at the time. Driven by a desire to recapture the spirit, creativity and aspirations of early twentieth-century Paris, Aiko Miyanaga began casting glass in these historic molds, seeking to breathe new life into these forms that had been dormant for a century, by filling them with the air of the present.
The resulting series, entitled valley of sleeping sea, emerged as a way of rekindling the connection between the Paris of 1900 and the Kyoto of the 2020s. “I know very little about what Paris was like in the Belle-Epoque, when my great-grandfather lived there before becoming a potter. I can only imagine it through the few surviving objects and materials. But as I walk through the city, imagining my great-grandfather's feelings as he lived through the dawn of the new century, I can't wait to see the Parisian landscape reflected in this glass that holds the air of the present. The absent forms that have long slumbered in Kyoto are now, in Paris, linked between past, present and future,” says Aiko Miyanaga. Located on the ground and second floors of a private mansion built in 1900, Le Clézio Gallery is proud to present 1900-2025: souffle de lumière, Aiko Miyanaga's first solo exhibition in France.
An established artist from a prestigious lineage of Japanese ceramists, she has just had museum exhibitions in Japan in 2023 at Maison Hermès, the Mori Art Museum and the Tomoya Glass Museum, and in 2024 at the Takamatsu Art Museum, the Saga Prefectural Art Museum, the Saitama Museum of Modern Art and the Aichi Prefectural Art Museum.