The obvious property of glass is that it is transparent, but for Yoshihiko Takahashi this is only one of its essential characteristics. The prolific glass artist, whose career is being honored by a retrospective at the Crafts Gallery of the Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, clearly has several handles on the substance. For him glass is not only a refractor of light, but it is also a medium with which to explore mass, emptiness, shape and design.
Holding the exhibition at the Crafts Gallery serves a useful purpose by setting up comparisons with more conventional craft arts, most notably ceramics. Both glass and ceramic art derive from the manufacture of functional items whose incidental aesthetic aspect has then been extended into pure art with a concomitant loss of functionality. In both cases, the degree to which functionality has been dispensed with has effectively brought into question the old division between arts and crafts.
With around 100 works, the show includes pieces from the 1980s, shortly after Takahashi set up his own workshop in Kanagawa Prefecture, to extremely recent ones that were perhaps made with this show in mind. With someone as creatively restless as Takahashi, this ensures that wide variety of approaches to glass art is on display.