ARTCOURT Gallery is proud to announce its first solo exhibition showcasing the works of Rui Sasaki, whose conceptual expression utilizing glass has captivated audiences worldwide.

Through her undergraduate degree at the Musashino Art University and MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design, Sasaki has studied glass through the domains of design and fine art. Since completing her education in 2010, she has won various awards from international competitions and has participated in numerous artist-in-residence programs throughout Europe and the United States. In recent years, Sasaki’s oeuvre has continued to garner attention on the global stage, appearing in museums and art festivals in Japan and abroad. She has actively expanded the scope of her repertoire to include a wide range of expressions, such as installation and live art.

In 2019, Sasaki’s work earned her the distinction of being selected for the Rakow Commission, one of the world’s most esteemed accolades overseen by the curatorial committee of the Corning Museum of Glass. In 2021, she clinched the Grand Prize at the Toyama International Glass Exhibition 2021. Her works have found homes in collections across glass museums, both domestically in Japan and internationally, and continue to captivate audiences and earn widespread acclaim. This solo exhibition comes after her site-specific exhibition, crafted during her tenure as artist-in-residence at the Portland Japanese Garden in Oregon, United States, held from March to June last year.

Sasaki views glass as a material suitable for recording and preserving existence, and her artistic production is thematically based on the ‘subtle intimacy’ and ‘nostalgia’ perceived through the nature of her immediate surroundings and the changes in her living environment.

She collects various things found in the nature of Kanazawa, where she is based, or wherever she happens to be staying. Sasaki then seals her findings, such as snow, plants, and room corners, into transparent glass, establishing a link between herself and the places where she has been, endeavoring to visualize memories that cannot be seen.

This exhibition focuses on the 'act of collecting,' a key element in Sasaki’s work. We have organized three of her signature series into three different exhibition spaces: Blue in the Snow, which was created by blowing molten glass with phosphorescent material into the snow; Corners at My Parents' House, which was molded from the corner of her hometown abode; and Reminiscences of the Garden, a collection of diseased or undesirable plants, weeded by the gardener of the Portland Japanese Garden, which were preserved like specimens. Her works function like diary entries, which she continuously produces, and can be seen as a map of her travels and a record of her collecting.

Sasaki’s move to the northwest region of Japan exposed her to snow with a high moisture content; she experienced a wave of ‘nostalgia’ upon seeing plowed snow that appeared blue, leading to various inspirations for this exhibition. Blue in the Snow, a reconstruction of her past work Reminiscences of the Water, involves mixing glass with phosphorescent particles, which have absorbed the sun’s light and glow blue in the dark; this mixture is then blown into nodular recesses in the snow creating glass sculptures which capture the different day-to-day conditions of the snow. The new works of this exhibition are embedded with invisible phenomena, such as the accumulation of light by phosphorescent particles and the time spent during the production process.

This blue that glows and fades in the faintness between invisible light and darkness can be appreciated as Sasaki’s presentation of a once-in-a-lifetime encounter of the ‘pleasure of adoration.’ We hope you will enjoy Sasaki’s highly original expression through glass, an ongoing record of accumulation through her ‘acts of collecting.’