On a sweltering summer day in Venice, the temperature in Yasuhiko Tsuchida's glass-making atelier feels at least 10 degrees hotter than it is outside. Men roast their faces against groaning furnaces, shirts drenched with sweat, pulling clumps of luminous molten glass from the fire as the glass artist directs the works.
Facing a canal on Murano Island — home to Venice's storied glass-making culture — the space has seen masters of glass come and go for hundreds of years. Today, Tsuchida — the only Japanese to run a Murano glass studio — carries on an ancient tradition creating contemporary artworks that shimmer with the magic of Venetian glass while giving off what he calls "a fragrance of Japan."
From the scorching crucible emerge works of subtle beauty and refinement, and Tsuchida's re-imagining of a 1,200-year-old Venetian heritage has led many to call him a "poet of glass." Since Tsuchida moved to Venice 25 years ago, he has gone from being an artist asking friends to buy pieces to an internationally recognized master winning prizes and exhibiting in prestigious galleries around the world. In 2015, he rendered Japanese calligrapher Sisyu's work in glass at the Milan Expo's Japan Pavilion, and last year produced work for a Japanese exhibit at the Venice Biennale of Architecture.