“AMANIWA – Roof Garden” Three Contemporary Crafts Arelsts

"Kyoko Tokumaru (Ceramics),Mariko Isozaki(Ceramics),Yoshihiko Takahashi(Glass)"

Encountering the “five senses” – A courtyard installation by contemporary craft artists.

”Amaniwa” is a garden covered in glass and opening up to the sky, forming the decorated lobby of OPAM’s third floor.
“Amaniwa” has been designed so that visitors can spend a leisurely time experiencing the four seasons, nature, and the weather with their whole bodies.
Here, colors and materials form a garden symphony, with three leading contemporary representative Japanese craft artists acting as the key performers.
Isozaki Mariko, who has worked in Milan, aimed to create a “crystal” transparency while spraying color onto acrylic materials and terracotta, creating an “image of a flower as seen nowhere else.”
Tokumaru Kyoko, an artist who embodies a “celebration of life,” used ceramics to create a limitless and dreamlike inner space, from inside which flowers blooming and forms reverberating with life can be seen.
The top leading authority in glassblowing, Takahashi Yoshihiko, has created a transparent piece of “playground equipment” that gives us a sense of his characteristic, free “jazz” style and an exciting sense of the artist as a “human artist.”
Time goes by, change is continuous, and in this unique museum, a “garden of growth” has been born.

Tokumaru Kyoko was born in 1963 in Tokyo. In 1991 she completed her MFA, majoring in Ceramic Art at the Graduate School of Tama Art University. She started her artistic career with an exhibition called “Changing ceramic art - the international modern ceramic art exhibition” at the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Part Museum in 1991. From 1996 to 2011, she participated in 11 art programs in Japan, the U.S., Argentina and Taiwan. She was the winner of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2006 and the Takashimaya fine-arts prize award in 2013. Her works are featured in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Yingge Ceramics Museum, Taiwan, and others.

Isozaki Mariko was born in 1964 in Tokyo. In 1990 she graduated from the Industrial, Interior and Craft Design Department of Musashino Art University where she majored in ceramics. She graduated from Faenze National Ceramic Arts Institute, Italy, in 1992. In 2005, she participated in a Government Overseas Study Program for artists for one year, studying in Italy. She passed away in September, 2013. Her works are displayed in Japan, Italy, and Taipei. Yoshihiko Takahashi

Takahashi Yoshihiko was born in 1958 in Tokyo. In 1980, he graduated from the department of three-dimensional design, Tama Art University. After working as a junior assistant in the facility of the department, he worked as an assistant in Glashaus am Wasserturm from 1982 to 1984. From 1985, he settled in his studio in Sagamihara-city, Kanagawa. He is presently a Professor at Tama Art University. His works are featured in the collections of the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Yokohama Museum of Art, Shimonoseki City Art Museum, Museum Kunstpalast, the Corning Museum of Glass, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and others.