The Scottish Gallery is delighted to present a new series of bronze cast boxes by Koji Hatakeyama. Scenes in Bronze marks his fifth exhibition with The Gallery and two years since his major retrospective at Musée Tomo. Hatakeyama is recognised internationally as a master of his craft in a country renowned for objects deeply connected to the traditions, ceremonies, and beliefs ingrained in Japanese cultural history.
Koji Hatakeyama was born in 1956 in Takaoka, Toyama Prefecture, a mountainous region northwest of Tokyo that has been a centre for bronze, copper, and lacquerware production since the early 1600s. He studied metalwork at the Kanazawa College of Arts and Crafts in 1980 and has since concentrated primarily on creating patinated, cast bronze boxes. From 2017 to 2022 Hatakeyama taught at Kanazawa College of Art as Professor of Metal Casting in the Department of Craft. Years of dedicated experimentation with bronze has led to an outstanding career and his work has been exhibited internationally and is held in numerous museum collections worldwide.
The sense of place in Koji Hatakeyama’s work is paramount. Toyama Prefecture is historically part of the Kaga feudal domain of the Maeda Daimyo, who were significant patrons of the arts and established Kaga as the centre of traditional bronze and copper casting, ceramics, and lacquerware. Bronze represents status; religious artifacts, swords,
and other war-related articles marked the social uniform of the aristocracy. The Takaoka Daibutsu Buddha is one of the great landmarks of the city: an impressive bronze sculpture sixteen meters high and weighing sixty-five tonnes, it is the third-largest bronze Buddha in Japan and symbolises the dominance and importance of bronze casting in Takaoka.
Today, the region produces around eighty percent of Japan’s casting works, both religious and secular. During the Meiji period (1868-1912), the Great Expositions of Europe showcased Japanese arts and crafts to the world for the first time. Japanese ornamental and functional metalwork particularly stood out; never before had an audience seen such inventive alloys, richly decorated surface patinas, and exquisite inlay techniques, which were regarded as both sublime and beautifully alien.
Hatakeyama’s contained vessels use traditional bronze casting techniques, where molten metal is poured into a mould to create the basic shape or box. Each box is named according to the number of faces within its shape, and a matching bronze lid is made. Various chemicals, such as miso paste and vinegar, are applied to the outer faces to achieve the surface patination, a process that takes months. The completed surfaces are entirely abstract and deeply connected to his surrounding landscape. Hatakeyama applies gold, platinum, or silver leaf to the
Koji Hatakeyama in his studio, Takaoka, Japan, 2024
interior. To complete the box, the base is often polished back to bronze or gilded, every detail is intentional and considered. The finished, signed piece is then placed inside a tomobako, a simple, elegant wooden box bearing the artist’s signature and seal.
Koji Hatakeyama describes bronze as being a material with memories of a thousand years, dating back to the Silk Road. I believe that within bronze lies a consciousness; one that was created in ancient times but that can also exhibit my own. For me, casting is not just a matter of pouring bronze into a mould. It is a way to express one’s own consciousness
Buddhist principles and the Japanese tea ceremony are evident in Hatakeyama’s enigmatic boxes. Some works relate directly to the tea ceremony, but there is an overarching aesthetic scheme at play. The use of Japanese tea developed as a transformative practice, such as the wabi-sabi principle. Wabi represents the inner, spiritual experiences of human lives, characterised by humility, restraint, simplicity, naturalism, profundity, imperfection, and asymmetry, with an emphasis on simple, unadorned objects. Sabi represents the outer side of
life. Among Japanese nobility, understanding emptiness was considered the most effective means to spiritual awakening and embracing imperfection, seen as the first step to satori or enlightenment.
There is a satisfying weight to Koji Hatakeyama’s boxes, from the richness of the patination that travels around the object to the actual physical weight of the work. Each box has a scholarly presence. Lifting the lid reveals a golden or silver interior that illuminates the viewer; in Japanese culture, there should be no darkness. Hatakeyama explains, a person experiencing the aura emitted from inside the box is able to understand the workings of the mind even more. When the box is closed, the inside is plunged into darkness; however, inside this darkness exists a coruscating realm.
While Koji Hatakeyama’s boxes are inextricably linked to Japan, his work also transcends and connects with Western philosophies of modernism and abstract expressionism.
Christina Jansen
Details from Hatakeyama’s studio, Takaoka, Japan, 2024
Every material has a latent consciousness I sense this each time I start to make something
If bronze does have its own consciousness I want to try drawing it out
Bronze casting is about pouring molten metal into a mould But is also me pouring in my consciousness
My consciousness mingles with that of bronze And something emerges as a result
Koji Hatakeyama
Because Hatakeyama uses the sand-casting method, the floor of his studio is thickly covered with a mixture of sand and clay. Although this is not unusual for a metal casting workshop, even now I find it difficult to grasp that for nearly 40 years he has created most of his astonishing body of work in such an environment. Hearing him explain during our visit the methods he uses, and has in many cases invented, to patinate his works confirmed what I have always thought about him being a latter-day alchemist.
Rupert Faulkner, 2023
6/ Eight Faces XVI, 2024 cast bronze with gold leaf interior H26.5 x W14 x D14 cm
from left to right:
7/ Six Faces IX, 2024
cast bronze with gold leaf and gold powder interior
H11.5 x W6 x D6 cm
8/ Six Faces VIII, 2024
cast bronze with gold leaf and gold powder interior
H10 x W5.5 x D5 cm
9/ Twelve Faces, 2024
cast bronze with gold leaf and gold powder interior
H23.5 x W10.2 x D10 cm
from left to right:
18/ Eight Faces V, 2024
19/ Eight Faces III, 2024
20/ Eight Faces IV, 2024
cast bronze with gold leaf and gold powder interior
H13.7 x W18 x D8 cm
I first encountered Hatakeyama’s work in 1994 when I was visiting galleries in Tokyo in search of works for potential inclusion in an exhibition on which I was then working. Entitled Japanese Studio Crafts: Tradition and the Avant-Garde, the exhibition was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the summer of 1995. At the recommendation of a curator at the Crafts Gallery of the Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art, I went to the Miharudo Gallery in Mejiro, where I spent a very productive afternoon with its owner. Among the works I purchased that day was a cast bronze box from Hatakeyama’s solo exhibition held at the gallery the previous year. What a strange and wonderful piece, I remember thinking, my excitement rising further when I opened the box and saw that its interior was completely covered in gold foil. The impact was instantaneous. I
felt as if an otherworldly force was drawing me inexorably into the mystical emptiness of a glowing void. Glimpsing nirvana or awakening to a spiritual truth is precisely what Hatakeyama has always wanted viewers to experience. The box is entitled Doing Little and belongs to a series of upright cuboid forms with upper and lower halves of equal height that Hatakeyama made in the mid-1990s. As I learnt from his retrospective exhibition held at Tokyo’s Musée Tomo in 2022, this group of works marked the beginning of his enduring fascination with casting boxes in bronze. This was followed shortly afterwards by the start of his use of patination, for which he is now renowned all over the world.
Rupert Faulkner, 2023
Senior Curator, Japan, Asian Department, Victoria & Albert Museum
21/ Eight Faces XV, 2024
cast bronze with gold leaf interior
H25.5 x W14.5 x D14.5 cm
