VENUES

Watari-um, The Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, was designed by Swiss architect Mario Botta and opened in September 1990. The museum holds three or four exhibitions (including shows of the collection) per year, covering a range of topics, including contemporary art, Japanese cultural thought, and architecture. Important international curators, such as Harald Szeemann (Switzerland), Jan Hoet (Belgium), and Jean-Hubert Martin (France), have also been invited to create exhibitions at the museum. Since its foundation, Watari-um has continued to make exhibitions that address current concerns and transfer ideas that are significant to the times.

In addition to exhibitions, Watari-um hosts many different kinds of education programs, including lectures to deepen the understandings of exhibitions, lectures on gardens as part of the long-time Garden Club program, children’s workshops, and study tours within and outside Japan.

Yoichi Umestu’s artistic practice incorporates everything from miniature drawings, pointillist paintings, and ceramics to video works documenting performances that use his own body as material to curating and running a non-profit gallery. The exhibition “Yoichi Umetsu | Pollinator” was curated by the artist himself and features works made between 2004 and 2021. The word pollinator means a mediator who carries and pollinates pollens from plants; it was chosen in this context to act as a metaphor for Umetsu’s own role. For the past year, Umetsu has resided in Shigaraki, one of the Six Old Kilns of Japan, and this exhibition will feature many of the new ceramic works he produced there.

The exhibition was made in cooperation with Mutsumi Urano, Sokyo Gallery, Yuji Tanaka (Yuto Co., Ltd.), and Otsuka Ohmi Ceramics Co., Ltd.