ARTCOURT Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Genta Ishizuka (born 1982).

Trained in Urushi Lacquering at Kyoto City University of Arts and later participating in an exchange program at the Royal College of Art in London, Genta Ishizuka began exhibiting as an artist in the late 2000s after graduating with his MFA. He produces abstract sculptural forms shaped through the dry lacquer technique (*1), characterized by organic, fluid contours, as well as two-dimensional works that conjure a sense of cosmic spatiality through the togi-dashi method (*2). At the heart of Ishizuka’s practice lies a sustained inquiry into perception, stirred by his medium’s translucent membrane and lustrous sheen.

By capturing the fundamental sense of beauty inherent in the living nature of lacquer as a material, Ishizuka’s work engages the tense boundary between craft and contemporary art, eliciting an unanticipated shift in perception. He has garnered wide acclaim in Japan and abroad, earning him the Grand Prize at the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize in 2019 and the Incentive Prize at the Kyoto Prefectural Cultural Award in 2024. His works have been acquired by major institutions such as the Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, marking the steady tarajectory of his artistic career.

Until now, Ishizuka’s pursuit has been the articulation of the surface sheen through the expression of the membrane of the urushi. In this exhibition, his first at ARTCOURT gallery in six years, he turns to a new sculptural series, Membrane Spot, featuring matte finishes and perforated forms that expose internal hollows. Through these works, he contemplates the lacquer membrane itself, their very presence shaped by absence, as the essence of urushi expression. The exhibition also includes his semi-relief wall-mounted pieces inspired by fragments of historic dry lacquer sculptures and new works from his ongoing Taxis Groove series which offer insight into the next phase of Ishizuka’s evolving practice.

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Without assigning any particular meaning to the form of internal core (tai), Ishizuka has long devoted himself to creating surfaces that draw out the expressive potential of urushi. His attention has remained on the superficial coating, which simultaneously reflects light and holds an unfathomable depth. For Ishizuka, the membrane is not a “manifestation of an invisible interior,” but a relationship where fundamentally dissimilar elements—inside and outside, light and dark, self and other—engage in mutual permeability, each acting on the other, each shaped by contingency.

At the center of this exhibition is Membrane Spot, a sculptural series realized through the dakkatsu kanshitsu (*3) (de-cored dry lacquer) technique. In this technique, the tree-sap-derived urushi loses its internal core (tai) that once gave it form, leaving behind the urushi membrane which transforms into a presence of its own. Openings pieced through the surface reveal the hollow interior that had been hidden within.

The sheen, once a source of layered meaning, has been replaced by a smooth, matte finish. What emerges is a presence that, having lost what it once enclosed, has ceased to exist as a membrane, becoming something that defies definition as such. This presence stands in deepening indistinguishability from the absence saturated with the living darkness within.

Ishizuka has also shown deep interest in urushi and its relationship to humankind—deeply embedded in the textures of daily life across East Asia in the form of bowls, chopsticks, and other implements—which has been shaped not only through visual experience but also through tactile perception, aural resonance, and olfactory presence. He speaks of how this intimate, embodied memory of urushi serves as a point of connection to his practice and how he has long nurtured conceptual explorations of textures and forms that evoke the act of applying urushi and the structural interplay of interior and exterior in vessels, the bowl chief among them.

Ishizuka draws on his sensibility and intellectual acuity to deconstruct the techniques and material properties of urushi and reconstructs them into expressions that hold within them untapped possibilities that elude interpretation through the established heuristics of duality or causality. At the same time, he brings into dialogue the milieu of urushi rooted in the textures of lived experience with the purity of visual experience. We invite you to experience this new undertaking by Genta Ishizuka.



1. A technique in which hemp cloth is layered over the internal core (tai), then coated, abraded, and polished through multiple applications of lacquer, wood powder, and polishing powder to create the final form.
2. A technique in which multiple layers of different colored lacquer are applied during the undercoating stage, sometimes embedding materials such as shell, and then abrading and polished with whetstones or similar tools to reveal patterns. Ishizuka uses unconventional materials for embedding, such as utility knife blades, fishing hoods, washers, sewing needles, and the lead for mechanical pencils.
3. A technique in which a portion of a dry lacquer form is pierced to remove the internal core (tai), leaving the interior hollow.

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Artist Statement



Absence

Several years ago, in the process of adapting a sculptural work to a wall-mounted piece, I cut into its form. The incision exposed the interior, and as I peered inside, I realized for the first time that my work was essentially composed of a membrane formed by the dry lacquer technique. Until then, I had conceived of my works as singular, solid masses, but in that moment of looking within, I became acutely aware that their essence resided entirely in the membrane itself.

Lacquer is a refined sap extracted from trees and has no form of its own. It takes on shape and expression when supported by a base, or tai. In my work, these tai are elastic fabric bags containing structural elements such as Styrofoam spheres or aluminum duct hoses. From there, I employ the dry lacquer (kanshitsu) technique, in which layers of hemp cloth are applied to the surface and fixed in place using lacquer, followed by a base coating and successive applications of increasingly refined lacquer.

In creating the wall-mounted piece, I removed the internal core, leaving only the dry lacquer membrane, which stood on its own. That moment of separation revealed a coexistence of presence and absence. This experience lies at the origin of my current solo exhibition.

As taught in the Heart Sutra, “form is emptiness, and emptiness is form”: all things lack fixed substance, and it is precisely within the void that meaning emerges. The lacquer membrane, while containing the hollow of absence, nonetheless comes into being as an undeniable presence.


Genta Ishizuka