The Aichi Triennale, one of Japan’s rising international art festivals, launched its sixth iteration this past weekend. Titled “A Time Between Ashes and Roses,” this year’s festival is led by artistic director Hoor Al Qasami, president and director of the Sharjah Art Foundation. The Triennale will run until November 30, and brings together over 60 artists and groups from 22 countries and territories, with artworks, performances and learning programs presented in various venues across the cities of Nagoya and Seto.
The titular phrase “A Time Between Ashes and Roses” references a verse by Adonis, a Syrian poet whose meditations on hope in the wake of war inspired Al Qasami. The Triennale seeks to visualize and explore our fraught relationship with the environment through a geologic perspective, and to capture the nuanced spectrum between devastation and renewal.
Within this overarching theme, it was Al Qasami’s priority to foster non-Western voices from around the world, highlighting distinct histories, cultural identities and lived experiences from the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia.
“The issues [of colonialism and ecological crisis] that we’re looking at today don’t only reflect what’s happening now, but what has been going on for generations, through many indigenous communities,” she said in the festival’s opening press conference. “I hope that we can find some solidarity and connection through this exhibition.”
Seto City, one of Japan’s “Six Ancient Kilns,” serves as one of the main venues for installations, which are staged across unlikely sites like an abandoned elementary school and an old public bathhouse. Other main venues include the Aichi Arts Center in the heart of Nagoya City, and Seto City’s sprawling Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum.
Read on to discover this year’s unmissable highlights.
‘Unforgettable Residues’ (2025), Rui Sasaki
One of this year’s most breathtaking works, without a doubt, is glass artist Rui Sasaki’s otherworldly installation “Unforgettable Residues” (2025), set in an old public bathhouse. Working with Seto locals, Sasaki selected various plants from the area, pressing them between glass sheets that were then fired. These ethereal creations descend from the ceiling and infuse the bathhouse’s darkened alcove with a haunting yet strangely comforting glow. Like many of her works, the piece evokes what the artist refers to as “subtle intimacy” — sensations of nostalgia and resonance — in unfamiliar spaces.
Installation view at Aichi Triennale 2025. Elena Damiani “Relieve III” (2025) ©︎ Aichi Triennale Organizing Committee. Photo: Ito Tetsuo.
‘Relieve III’ (2025), Elena Damiani
Peruvian artist Elena Damiani’s work “Relieve III” (2025) is part of her archetypal “Relieve” series, which explores the evolution of landforms through centuries. The Triennale’s installation uses loess, a local material containing gairome clay — which has long supported Seto’s ceramic industry — silica sand and iron oxide. Displaying rhythmic trails left by “oloids” (geometrical objects made of onyx gemstones), Damiani gives physical form to the enormity of geologic time that far exceeds human activity. The piece is exhibited at the Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum.
Wangechi Mutu, “Sleeping Serpent” (2014). Courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro London.
‘Sleeping Serpent’ (2014-2025), Wangechi Mutu
Also shown at the Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum are several incredible pieces by Wangechi Mutu, a Kenyan artist based in New York and Nairobi. Mutu’s work engages with the core principle of figuration — how we represent what we perceive, particularly in relation to the female body.
“Sleeping Serpent” (2014-2025) is a long snakelike form, with a bulging body and a sculpted ceramic face nestled on a pillow. The wax-dipped miscellaneous objects around the resting head are referred to as “dreams,” which grow in number every time the sculpture is displayed. Mutu explains that the figure is a self-portrait of sorts, representing the way she was consumed by the “mountains of magazines and paper” used for her collage work.
Installation View at Aichi Triennale 2025. Simone Leigh, “Untitled” (2025). Photo: Tokyo Weekender.
‘Untitled’ (2025), Simone Leigh
New York-based multimedia artist Simone Leigh’s works, which she describes as auto-ethnographic, often utilize forms traditionally associated with African art to explore aesthetics across African Diasporas and the lived realities of Black women. The piece, exhibited at the Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum, consists of a cowrie shell skirt wrapped around a clay figure. The usage of cowrie shells is deeply symbolic for two reasons: They were used in divination amongst the Yoruba people of West Africa, yet also represent the trauma and exploitation of transatlantic slavery, as one of the world’s oldest forms of currency.
Selected Works by Izumi Kato
The “Design Aichi” Gallery at the Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum is largely dedicated to acclaimed Japanese artist Izumi Kato’s paintings and sculptures, which draw from primordial life forms, marine life, flora and fauna. The enigmatic creatures he summons are at once organic and alien, evoking a corporeal world viewed through a microscope and a mystical, spiritual world. Kato’s visual references to marine life have been accumulated since childhood, as he grew up fishing by the seaside in Shimane Prefecture.
Selected Works by Yuriko Asano
Among the plethora of artworks at the Aichi Arts Center are Yuriko Asano’s botanical illustrations and painted ceramic plates, which contemplate the symbiosis between humans and nature. For the Triennale, Asano focused on the relationship between the Seto area’s vegetation and pottery making, turning the plants she encountered while walking around Seto into motifs adorning large, glazed plates.
“Twisting Garden” (2021) and “Resting Medicinal Harb” (2020), made of washi paper, oils, water-dried pigments and mineral pigments, render the distinct histories and beauty of plants with great care, resulting in imperfectly harmonious compositions. “Eating Horse Chestnuts” (2014), a three-panel oil painting, captures the generational wisdom of a food culture with stunning fluidity and vitality.
Mohammed Kazem, “Photographs with Flags” (1997-2003). Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Isabelle, Dubai.
‘Photographs with Flags’ (1997-2003), Mohammed Kazem
Born and based in Dubai, Mohammed Kazem addresses the loss of cultural identity and rapid modernization through meditations on space and time. Kazem’s videos, photography and performance media often feature the artist himself. The series “Photographs with Flags” (1997-2003) is a poignant example of this practice, employing Kazem as a Rückenfigur (a “Figure from the Back” that simultaneously invites and isolates the viewer) gazing at desert and sea landscapes. As a lone witness to these sites on the brink of development, Kazem suspends constantly shifting landscapes in time. “Photographs with Flags” can be found at the Aichi Arts Center.
‘Sky Revolution’ (2023), Bassim Al Shaker
One of the gallery spaces in the Arts Center is dedicated to Iraqi artist Bassim Al Shaker’s heartbreakingly beautiful canvases, “Sky Revolution” (2023) and new pieces “Allegory of the Sky” and “New Birth.” The former renders scenes witnessed by Al Shaker following bombings during the Iraq War in 2003, meant to evoke the simultaneous cataclysmic rupture and frozen silence of the sky during aerial bombardment.
Bassim Al Shaker, “Sky Revolution” (2023). Courtesy of the artist.
“These paintings are not about death. They are not about the bomb. They are about the moment after,” states Al Shaker in the exhibition description. “Each painting is a new beginning. There is death, but I have a new life. I am still alive.” The newer paintings poetically embody the Triennale’s theme of ashes and roses, depicting vibrant pigments blossoming even in the midst of destruction.
Ohkojima Maki, “Tomorrow’s Harvest” (2017-18) © Maki Ohkojima with Agros Art Project All Rights Reserved, Deposited at Aomori Museum of Art. Photo: Mari Habaya.
‘Tomorrow’s Harvest’ (2017-2018), Maki Ohkojima
Seeing Maki Ohkojima’s large-scale painting — a kaleidoscopic tapestry of earthly and mythical creatures, landscapes and symbols intermingling in planetary harmony — for the first time in one of Aichi Arts Center’s largest gallery spaces is a borderline spiritual experience. Based in Tokyo, Ohkojima has participated in residency programs across India, Poland, China, Mexico, France and more. In her work, she ponders the complex processes of life and death and interspecies relationships, in part inspired by her observation of marine ecosystems in the 2017 Tara Pacific research project.
‘Between Currents and Bloom’ (2019-Present), Mulyana
Indonesian artist Mulyana showcases one of the festival’s most intricate, lush and enchanting installations, meticulously crocheted from recycled yarn. Mulyana, who began knitting while working part-time at a bookstore in Bandung, Indonesia, constructs these vivid, sprawling marine environments to address the need for environmental restoration in the country. His craftsmanship is nothing short of spectacular, capturing the ocean’s fantastical life forms — schools of fish, undulating coral reefs, downy moss — with playful whimsy.
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