The Mingei movement, which began in the 1920s under the leadership of the thinker Soetsu Yanagi, created diverse connections between people across regions, borders, occupations, and generations. One of these people was Tamesaburo Yamamoto, the first president of Asahi Breweries, Ltd. (today's Asahi Group Holdings, Ltd.). He is known to have supported the Mingei movement from its early days. The works collected with his backing are housed in our museum as the Tamesaburo Yamamoto Collection. A century has passed since the birth of the term "Mingei," and the works still exude an unfading charm.
This exhibition focuses on nine artists from the Yamamoto Tamesaburo Collection: Shoji Hamada, Bernard Leach, Kenkichi Tomimoto, Keisuke Serizawa, Shiko Munakata, Kanjiro Kawai, Tatsuaki Kuroda, Goro Aota, and Ethel Mairet. Pairing them in succession—Hamada and Leach, Leach and Tomimoto, Tomimoto and Serizawa, etc.—and discussing their works and episodes, the exhibition illuminates these artists' relationships linked in a chain. This is not a typical group exhibition or two-person exhibition. Come and see how this unique approach reveals individual relationships between the nine artists, unexpected commonalities they share, and people's connections that stemmed from this chain.