Image credit: Francis Giacobetti
Opening exhibition SA NI HA | さには
June 7, 2025 - July 6, 2025
Hiroshi Teshigahara: Visionary Worlds
Commemorating the 100th Anniversary of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Birth
In 2027, we celebrate the centennial of the birth of Hiroshi Teshigahara (1927 - 2001)—an artist whose legacy of radicalism continues to resonate across generations. Marking this milestone, we are proud to launch Hiroshi Teshigahara: Visionary Worlds: a commemorative retrospective that engages with the full spectrum of Teshigahara’s artistic output and its direct impact in the modern world. This centennial draws inspiration from the pioneering spirit of the Sogetsu Art Center, a transformational space and meeting point for the Tokyo-based postwar avant-garde and international artists presenting and creating works, many for the first time in Japan. As the appointed Director, Hiroshi distilled a credo for the Sogetsu Art Center: “to create spaces where everyone is free to express themselves and engage in dialogue.” The mission of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s centennial is to invite the next generation into the world of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s boundary-pushing art as we move into the future. Teshigahara’s lifelong experimentations—in filmmaking, painting, illustration, Ikebana, bamboo installation, ceramics, stage design, and calligraphy—remain deeply relevant today, continuing to question and illuminate the relationships between art and society, the individual and the collective, and the natural and the manmade.
As we move toward 2027, Hiroshi Teshigahara: Visionary Worlds will unfold through a dynamic programming series that includes exhibitions, film screenings, performances, video installations, talkbacks and presentations. Instead of confining Teshigahara’s work to any single medium or period, we aim to rediscover it as a continuous, evolving conversation with his multidimensional body of work —one that invites us to ask what his vision can still offer us today.
Opening Exhibition "SA NI HA | さには"
The inaugural event of this centennial project is the exhibition SA NI HA | さには, held in Isamu Noguchi’s iconic Heaven (Tengoku) garden at the Sogetsu Plaza. This exhibition traces the essence of Teshigahara’s sculptural imagination through the twin lenses of ikebana and ceramics.
Presented in poetic dialogue with Isamu Noguchi’s stone garden, this deeply immersive installation brings together Teshigahara’s ceramic works and his handwritten calligraphy on Echizen washi paper. These elements converge to create a space where nature and artifice, stillness and motion, material and spirit intermingle.
The title SA NI HA refers to a sacred garden purified for welcoming the divine—a concept that resonates deeply with this exhibition. Visitors are invited to listen closely to the quiet presence of Teshigahara’s spirit, attuned to the subtle, wordless sensations that permeate the space.
Dates: June 7, 2025 - July 6, 2025
Hours: 10:00 AM - 7:00 PM (open until 8:00 PM on Fridays. Closed on Sunday, June 29, 2025)
Location: Sogetsu Plaza Tengoku 1st Floor, Sogetsu Kaikan
The Tengoku stone garden, designed and created by Isamu Noguchi, is a symbolic centerpiece of the Sogetsu Kaikan. Teshigahara’s foray into ceramic vessel-making is said to have been spurred both by a desire to break away from traditional forms and by Noguchi’s observation that “in ikebana, the vessel is the weak point.”
His artistic process expanded organically from ikebana to sculpture, to spatial design, and eventually to garden-making. His first garden was for the Ken Domon Museum of Photography in Sakata City, a project by architect Yoshio Taniguchi. Teshigahara’s garden stands in dialogue with a neighboring garden designed by Isamu Noguchi, the two separated only by the museum’s architecture. Around the same period, at the Sogetsu Ceramic Studio in Echizen, he created a garden composed of moss and carefully placed stones of varying sizes—once again seeking to forge a “new nature” that transcends the boundaries of the natural world.
A Deep Connection with Echizen
Teshigahara’s enduring relationship with Echizen began in 1972 with a visit for a feature in Sogetsu magazine titled “Ikebana in the Environment.” Inspired by this encounter, he established the Sogetsu Ceramic Studio in Echizen the following year, initiating a way of living and working rooted in the region’s rich natural environment and cultural traditions. His time in Echizen brought him into contact not only with clay, but also with bamboo and washi paper—materials that would become central to his practice.
Revisiting a Landmark Exhibition
This exhibition also revisits a pivotal moment in Teshigahara’s career: the 1980 joint exhibition with Isamu Noguchi, held in the very same Tengoku space. Several of Teshigahara’s ceramic works from that historic exhibition have been carefully reinstalled—many in their original positions—to trace the path of his artistic inquiry as it conversed with Noguchi’s garden. Complementing the installation is a collage-style banner incorporating Teshigahara’s handwritten calligraphy on Echizen washi, visually bridging his ceramics with Noguchi’s stone garden.
In this contemplative space, we invite you to listen quietly—to the echoes reverberating from Hiroshi Teshigahara’s brushwork and vessels, and to the silent dialogue between two artistic giants whose visions continue to shape our understanding of art, space, and the spirit.
Exhibition Context
Hiroshi Teshigahara
Hiroshi Teshigahara, the first son of Sofu Teshigahara who was the founder of Sogetsu School, was born in Tokyo in 1927. He is well-known world wide as the director of such films as Suna no Onna (Woman in the Dunes) written by Kobo Abe and Rikyu. In 1980, he became the third Iemoto of Sogetsu School. Since then, he demonstrated his originality using bamboo at his large-scale solo exhibitions at such famous museums as National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, Korea (1989), Palazzo Reale in Milan, Italy (1995) and the Kennedy Center in New York (1996). Domestically, he held solo exhibitions and displayed installations nationwide, including GEN-ICHIRO INOKUMA Museum of Contemporary Art in Marugame and Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art. His works were acclaimed as an unprecedented extension of art beyond the boundary of Ikebana.
Both domestically and abroad, he undertook stage and art direction of such performances as the opera Turandot (Lyon, France, 1992; Geneva, Switzerland, 1996), an original Noh play Susanoh (the Avignon Theatre Festival, 1994), Sloka by Chandralekha Dance Company (1999), an original outdoor dance play Susano Iden (1991). His stage art of which the main component was bamboo and his stage direction itself were enthusiastically received.
Moreover, he demonstrated his unique talent for ceramic art and calligraphy, and continued to develop his creativity in various fields of art throughout his later years. In the 1990’s, he expanded the range of Ikebana by advocating Renka which is a series of impromptu Ikebana arranged by multiple artists.
Kiri Teshigahara
Kiri Teshigahara was born as the eldest daughter of Hiroshi Teshigahara. In 1974, she moved to the United States to study in Connecticut and graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 1976. She began her artistic career as a photographer for Ryuko Tsushin and High Fashion, capturing the dynamic intersection of fashion and visual culture.
In 1978, she co-founded the influential New York City punk band Eel Dogs, marking her deep engagement with the city’s underground music and art scenes. Her leadership in the arts expanded further in 1985 when she became director of the New York chapter of the Sogetsu School of Ikebana. In 1990, she produced Hiroshi Teshigahara’s artistic activities in the U.S., including a solo exhibition at 65 Thompson and a screening of his film Rikyu, and worked at the Gagosian Gallery the same year.
She later served as Executive Director of Sogetsu North America, building cultural bridges through art, and since 2021 has held the roles of International Director and Art Project Director of Sogetsu. In this position, she has led global collaborations and multidisciplinary projects with artists inspired by the legacy of Sogetsu’s pioneering spirit—including the Sogetsu Art Center, a driving force in Japan’s avant-garde art movement of the 1960s.
Sogetsu Foundation
7-2-21 Akasaka
Minato-ku, Tokyo 107-8505
hiroshicentennial@gmail.com