contemporary Japanese art

In her solo exhibition at Gallery G-77, Osaka-based artist Risako Yahagi presents a retrospective of her glass sculptures, focusing on light, materiality, and transformation. She explores the balance between transparency and opacity, using light to shape form and perception. Her abstract works shift depending on the viewer’s perspective, as shadow and illumination interact dynamically.

Yahagi primarily works with kiln-casting, shaping glass inside an electric furnace to create her sculptures. While some of her works are formed solely from pure glass, others incorporate embedded materials such as silver, copper, and silk, adding complexity to the casting process. These elements interact with the glass in ways that influence light and depth, reinforcing the conceptual themes in her work.

 

The title Reflection of Life – Beyond the Light of Glass reflects Yahagi’s exploration of shifting experiences and emotions through sculpture. Drawing from personal reflection, fleeting moments, and natural phenomena, she transforms light, transparency, and shadow into abstract expressions of memory, change, and impermanence. Each piece captures an aspect of lived experience—moments of clarity, transitions, and the unseen forces that shape perception. This exhibition features different series, demonstrating her ongoing investigation into how glass can preserve, diffuse, and manipulate light across varying levels of transparency and density, serving as a means of expressing her ideas on perception and transformation.

In her works, Yahagi strips glass of excess, allowing its inherent qualities—light, shadow, and depth—to take center stage. Rather than serving a decorative or functional purpose, her sculptures embrace minimalism, conceptualism, and the language of abstract art, where form and material interaction take precedence over representation. Her works are not fixed objects but evolving compositions, shaped by illumination and transparency. By reducing her practice to its fundamental elements, Yahagi captures experience, emotion, and the intangible beauty of impermanence, inviting the viewer to engage not just with the object itself but with the fleeting interplay of light and perception that defines its existence.

 

In the Dreamy Silk Drifting in Glass series, Yahagi gives "voice" to silk, capturing its delicate balance between fragility and permanence by suspending it within glass. She explores the relationship between silk as a natural material and glass as an ancient artifact, using transparency and layering to evoke depth and movement. Seeking to represent silk threads drifting as if they had a will of their own, she preserves their ephemeral nature within glass, allowing them to appear weightless and suspended in time. After silkworms spin their cocoons, artisans dye the threads by hand before fabric production begins, yet shredded silk threads are often discarded, their presence lost despite their origins in a meticulous craft. This silk, shaped through the sacrifice of silkworms and human craftsmanship, embodies the interdependence of natural life and human ingenuity. By capturing these fibers in glass, Yahagi transforms them into a metaphor for the coexistence of nature and human intervention, ensuring that even discarded threads remain suspended in light and translucency.

 

Deep in The Light builds upon Yahagi’s previous explorations, introducing a heightened sense of drama through the interplay of color and form. In this recent work, she foregoes material inclusions, working solely with glass, where the dark, ink-like shapes appear to drift within the transparency, evoking a sense of depth and movement. These shadowy forms contrast sharply with the luminous clarity around them, intensifying how light interacts with the structure. Just as shadows define the presence of light, the darkness within the sculpture enhances its luminosity, making the surrounding transparency more vivid. This contrast creates a sense of uncertainty, drawing the viewer inward and suggesting something unseen or emerging—a reference to the fears or unknown elements that shape human perception.

Darkness in this work is not an absence of light but an essential presence, balancing clarity and obscurity, transparency and depth. Yahagi transforms light into a force that does not simply illuminate but also reveal the unknown, offering a poetic meditation on perception and transformation.
 

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