Light and Abundance: Gold in Japanese Art

New York, NY — Ippodo Gallery is pleased to present its grand opening of our new flagship location in New York’s historic TriBeCa district at 35 N Moore Street, beginning a new chapter in the gallery’s history as a leading bridge to Japanese kogei art since 2008. The inaugural exhibition, Light and Abundance: Gold in Japanese Art, coinciding with Asia Week New York celebrates the immutable beauty of gold featuring a group of fourteen master artists’ latest pieces in lacquer, metal, Nihonga painting, and ceramics from March 13 to April 17, 2025.

The pure material, never to tarnish nor rust, is the object of fascination and admiration for more than a thousand years in Japan. Gold represents divinity, the eternal, and symbolizes spiritual enlightenment since ancient times, serving to cover statues of Buddha, temples like Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto, and the feudal lord Hideyoshi Toyotomi’s famous Gold Tea Room. Under shadows the gold leaf adorned folding byobu screen thrives; “in the darkness, where sunlight never penetrates, gold leaf will pick up a distant glimmer, then suddenly send forth an ethereal glow, a faint golden light like the horizon at sunset” (Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows). ‘Zipangu, the Land of Gold’ as Marco Polo named the archipelago more than five-hundred years ago, reminds how the country was once the foremost global producer of gold, which empowered the development of a distinct Japanese visual culture. While modern minimalist and wabisabi philosophies rise, flamboyance remains a quintessential element of Japanese aesthetics. Ippodo Gallery presents fourteen top emerging Japanese artists in contemporary kogei for whom gold persists as a medium of innovation and virtue.

Light and Hope for New Beginnings

There is a certain color that people use to represent light.

The color of gold. It radiates a dazzling energy, overwhelming purity, and emits the brilliance of truth. If silver represents the moon (yin) in Japanese art, then gold has come to symbolize the sun (yang).

Gold (Au79), believed to be the first metal discovered by humankind, is an imperishable substance—impervious to rust, unaffected by external forces, and never to lose its luster. When ancient people first unearthed gold and witnessed the radiant glow, the experience must have felt like an encounter with the fundamental energy of the universe itself. For thousands of years, across cultures and civilizations, gold has been revered as a symbol of immutability, immortality, eternity, and protection from malevolent forces.

Gold possesses high thermal conductivity and vibrational frequency; seventy-nine atomic electrons moving at an astonishing speed of 160,000 km per second. In recent years, nanotechnology has highlighted the exceptional stability of gold at the atomic level—resistant to oxidation and stable even at room temperature—making it a promising material for energy-efficient applications.