In her book "North to the Orient," published in 1935, aviator Anne Morrow Lindbergh, one of America's first female pilots, and wife of fellow aviator Charles Lindbergh, wrote of the cultural differences she experienced traveling across Asia, and on the simple act of saying farewell. She remarked of her fondness for the Japanese word "sayonara," which literally means "since it must be so." Unlike the foreign equivalents of "goodbye" or "au revoir," each denying the significance of the moment by dwelling on the more emotional notion of separation, "sayonara" accepts the parting. Yet departing for the sky would always be as momentous as it would be perilous, with any fear consumed by the anticipation of exploring the limitless sky above.

Modern aviation has transformed our relationship with home soil and foreign ground, and while it would seem there is little in aviation left to be discovered, the limits of flight still remain a source of constant invention. America's recent Solar Impulse project to design a solar-powered plane that can fly unaided by fuel both day and night, for example, challenges not only engineering and technical skills — the plane is wafer-thin and wrapped in micro-thin solar paneling to make it extremely lightweight — but also its designers' temperament, which can only be impassioned.

"OpenSky 3.0 — Creating the Aircraft of Dreams," the current exhibition at 3331 Arts Chiyoda, documents a down-to-earth aeronautical challenge by engineer, pilot and designer Kazuhiko Hachiya.