NEWS
Cerith Wyn Evans
Dates: Mar 28 – Apr 25, 2026
Location: Stone garden “Heaven”, the Sogetsu Kaikan 1F
Address: 7-2-21 Akasaka, Minato-ku, Tokyo
Opening hours: 10:00AM – 5:00PM
Closed on Sundays
Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of the work of British contemporary artist Cerith Wyn Evans, on view from Saturday, March 23 through Saturday, April 25 at the stone garden Heaven, on the first floor of Sogetsu Kaikan in Akasaka, Tokyo. The third in a series, following the artist’s solo exhibitions held at the same venue in 2018 and 2023, the exhibition brings together a large abstract neon piece that is one of Evans’s signature works; a work based on a passage from the Japanese translation of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time; and a mobile that gives off a variety of sounds.
Flowers are beautiful,
but ikebana is not necessarily so.
A flower, once arranged, is no longer a flower.
Once arranged, a flower becomes a person.
—Sofu Teshigahara, Kadensho, Sogetsu Shuppan, November 1979, p. 19
Evans is drawn to instances of radical rethinking, in fields from literature, film, and art to astronomy and physics, that have called existing frameworks of perception into question. By drawing on such sources and recasting them in other media such as neon, light, and sound, he draws out the latent beauty of their content and builds further layers atop his work’s underlying concepts. More than advancing any specific new meaning, Evans’s practice lays bare how meanings are formed and solidified, and creates conditions for unraveling them. Marked by a deep intelligence and humor, his works draw us out of our established modes of perception and create space for seeing the world anew.
The venue for this exhibition, the stone garden Heaven (1977) by Isamu Noguchi, occupies an open, glass-walled space behind the main entrance of Sogetsu Kaikan, a building designed by Kenzo Tange. The Sogetsu School of Ikebana, headquartered at Sogetsu Kaikan, was founded in 1927 by Sofu Teshigahara. Departing radically from the formalist ikebana of the time, the school sent shockwaves through the world of ikebana with unconventional, avant-garde works free of any restriction on setting, practitioner, or material. In the postwar years, it actively expanded abroad and engaged with contemporary art, building on its founding spirit and developing it further to the present day.
Deeply drawn to the avant-garde spirit of the Sogetsu School, Evans aspired to hold a solo exhibition in this stone garden, a hope first realized in 2018. For that exhibition, he placed three softly flickering columns of light within the garden, summoning a presence akin to musical tone and transforming the space into a stage on which the memories embedded in the site were silently reenacted. The columns of light returned for his second exhibition in 2023, when a neon work based on passage from Proust was installed on the uppermost tier of the stone garden. Translated from the French into Japanese by Kazuyoshi Yoshikawa, the text, once transformed into neon by Evans, shifts from something to be read into something to be seen and experienced, directly engaging the viewer’s bodily perception.
The exhibitions of 2018, 2023, and the present one are united by works that connect each show to the next. As a trilogy, they take viewers on a pilgrimage through a richly layered semantic space of singular architectural character. The final chapter in that sequence, the current exhibition brings back the Proust neon work and presents one of Evans’s signature works, a large abstract neon piece that appears to be drawn in light directly on the air. It is inspired by the apple, a symbol of Hirosaki City, Aomori Prefecture.
The work brings together multiple layers of context surrounding the apple: the allegory of original sin, the logo of a global tech giant, the familiar anecdote about Newton’s discovery of the law of universal gravitation, and the fact that small anomalies in Mercury’s orbit, which that same law could not account for, pointed to the need for Einstein’s theory of relativity. Religion has shaped the foundations of human thought, society, and culture, while technology has become the substrate on which our cognition, our relationships, and the very structure of our lives are reconfigured. Meanwhile, advances in physics are said to have established the modern worldview in which phenomena are not mysteries but can be grasped through reason and universal laws.
Evans’s neon works have often incorporated diagrams used to illustrate the kata, or set forms, of the shite, the principal actor in Noh theater. These kata function as vessels through which content is conveyed. The present work inverts his previous practice: rather than depicting the vessel, it brings the content itself to the foreground, through radial shapes evoking a flash of inspiration and specific forms that recall the orbit of Mercury or a cross section of an apple.
Made up of stones whose varied surface finishes take on a wide range of qualities, of light filtering from above and shifting moment by moment, and of falling water whose sound fills the space, Heaven is at once a stone garden and a stage, offering the viewer a range of vantage points. After eight years in sustained dialogue with this singular setting, Evans handles the present exhibition as his own act of ikebana, placing an abstract neon work within the garden as one might arrange a flower.
Cerith Wyn Evans was born in 1958 in Llanelli, Wales, and currently lives and works in London. His major solo exhibitions include Sogetsu Kaikan, Tokyo (2026, 2023 and 2018); Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2025); Centre Pompidou-Metz (2024); Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2021); Pola Museum of Art, Kanagawa (2020); Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2019); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2018); Tate Britain Commission, London and Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (both 2017); Museion, Bolzano, Italy (2015); Serpentine Gallery, London (2014); Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2011); Casa Luis Barragán, Mexico City (2010); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (2008) and Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris (2006). Evans has participated in numerous international group exhibitions including Skulptur Projekte Münster, Germany and the 57th Venice Biennale (both 2017); Moscow Biennial (2011); Aichi Triennale, Nagoya (2010); “The Kaleidoscopic Eye. Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection,” Mori Art Museum, Tokyo and Yokohama Triennale (2008); Istanbul Biennial (2005); and represented Wales at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003).
The exhibition is supported by Ruinart (MHD Moët Hennessy Diageo) and the Sogetsu Foundation.
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