Year: 2025
Medium: glass, ash from plants, aluminum frame, LED
Dimensions: 90.8 x 44.1 x 2.4 cm (35 3/4 x 17 3/8 x 1 in.)
Acquired from the artist, 2025
This work was commissioned by the museum. It is from Rui Sasaki’s “Subtle Intimacy” series, in which plants are placed between two plates of glass and fired at a high temperature. When the glass plates are reheated, they adhere to one another, while the plant fragments burn between them and turn into water and ash, losing their shape. However, in the firing process, the subtle forms of the plants, from the veins of the leaves to the tips of their roots, turn into white ash, imprinting themselves as vivid afterimages onto the inside of the glass. The moisture left in the plants produces air bubbles that spread out into infinite particles of light, increasing the salience of the traces of the plants. For this work, the artist collected plants from the grounds of Shibuya Kyoiku Gakuen, which has ties to this museum. While glass is translucent and delicate, it is not biodegradable in the natural world, and it is expected that its stability as a material means it will survive on Earth for millions of years. Sasaki focuses on the duality nature of glass and attempts to entrust the plants with memories to preserve them through the transparency and longevity of glass. In the artist’s work, the plants that have been burned do not vanish into ash with their memories, but remain semi-permanently within this translucent medium, having been transformed into inorganic ash that can no longer be decomposed.
