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Surface and Signal
Blum
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Artists
Kazunori Hamana, Akane Saijo, Peter Shear, Yuji Ueda
June 17, 2025, Tokyo—BLUM is pleased to present Surface and Signal, a group exhibition of work by Kazunori Hamana, Akane Saijo, Peter Shear, and Yuji Ueda.
Surface and Signal brings together four artists whose practices engage with formal clarity, material honesty, and sensitivity to the boundaries between intention and chance. The exhibition foregrounds how each artist operates within the inherent structure of their chosen medium—painting and ceramics, respectively—while maintaining a looseness that allows for vulnerability, gesture, and quiet radicalism.
Reiterating the poetic tendencies of his practice, Shear’s paintings in Surface and Signal are pithy bursts of evocative gestures rooted in wide-reaching, visual reference to moments in culture and art history. With brushstrokes that both emphasize the artist’s hand and physical qualities of his paint, the expressive gestures in Shear’s works, such as Current (2025), call out to the materiality and intricate glazing of ceramics by Kazunori Hamana, Akane Saijo, and Yuji Ueda.
Hamana’s vessels, hand-built by coiling extruded strands of ash gray clay, carry the imprint of the artist’s palms and fingers throughout their physicality and brushed glazing. Robust and sizable, these rotund basins team with the minute details imparted upon them by human entropy and the circumstances of their making. Similarly examining the sublime implications of cultivated chance, Ueda aligns himself with the Shigaraki ceramic tradition of beautiful imperfections. Using a layer of plaster atop clay, the shells of Ueda’s vessels are built to crack and peel away revealing oozing, vivid glaze and cast forms that have been used in Japan since the Edo period.
Saijo creates ceramic forms that correspond to and create space for the human body. Often staging activations wherein performers breathe into or interface with her work, she calls attention to the unknowable and disjointed space of communication and perception that divides us all. Skillfully glazing her impeccably built forms, Saijo, like the other artists in Surface and Signal, plays with the evocative tension of achieving modes of perfection in our inherently disordered human experience.
Kazunori Hamana (b. 1969, Osaka, Japan) lives and works in Chiba, Japan. His work has been exhibited at public art institutions including the Okura Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan (2023); The Warehouse, Dallas, TX (2023); the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA (2021); Towada Art Center, Towada, Japan (2017); and Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, Japan (2016). His work is held in the public collections of BY ART MATTERS, Hangzhou, China; and The Rachofsky Collection, Dallas, TX.
Akane Saijo (b. 1989, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan) lives and works in Kyoto, Japan. She completed her BA in Fine Art and MA in Ceramics at Kyoto City University of Arts, Kyoto, Japan, and received the grand prize at the first edition of MIMOCA EYE at Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Kagawa, Japan in 2022. Her first museum solo exhibition, Akane Saijo—Double Touch, was held at the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art (MIMOCA) in early 2025. Her work is represented in the collections of the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Aichi, Japan; and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, among others. In fall 2025, Saijo’s work will be featured in A Time Between Ashes and Roses, part of the Aichi Triennale, followed by a solo exhibition at BLUM, Los Angeles in November.
Peter Shear (b. 1980, Beverly Farms, MA) lives and works in Bloomington, IN. His work was the subject of the solo exhibition Time Stamp at Herron School of Art + Design, Indiana University, Indianapolis, IN (2019). Group exhibitions include The Feminine In Abstract Painting, The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, New York, NY (2023); A Wild Note of Longing: Albert Pinkham Ryder and a Century of American Art, New Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford, MA (2021); Locus Focus: Peter Shear and Arvind Sundararajan, 840 Gallery, University of Cincinnati, OH (2018); and Basic Instinct, Peter Shear and Ellen Siebers, FJORD, Philadelphia, PA (2016). In 2025, he received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY.
Yuji Ueda (b. 1975, Shigaraki, Shiga Prefecture, Japan) comes from a family of award-winning tea farmers in the Shiga Prefecture town of Shigaraki, where he lives and works. His work has been included in prominent group exhibitions including Unearthed, Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA), Costa Mesa, CA; and Earth, Wind, and Fire: Visions of the Future from Asia, Okura Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan (2024).
Surface and Signal brings together four artists whose practices engage with formal clarity, material honesty, and sensitivity to the boundaries between intention and chance. The exhibition foregrounds how each artist operates within the inherent structure of their chosen medium—painting and ceramics, respectively—while maintaining a looseness that allows for vulnerability, gesture, and quiet radicalism.
Reiterating the poetic tendencies of his practice, Shear’s paintings in Surface and Signal are pithy bursts of evocative gestures rooted in wide-reaching, visual reference to moments in culture and art history. With brushstrokes that both emphasize the artist’s hand and physical qualities of his paint, the expressive gestures in Shear’s works, such as Current (2025), call out to the materiality and intricate glazing of ceramics by Kazunori Hamana, Akane Saijo, and Yuji Ueda.
Hamana’s vessels, hand-built by coiling extruded strands of ash gray clay, carry the imprint of the artist’s palms and fingers throughout their physicality and brushed glazing. Robust and sizable, these rotund basins team with the minute details imparted upon them by human entropy and the circumstances of their making. Similarly examining the sublime implications of cultivated chance, Ueda aligns himself with the Shigaraki ceramic tradition of beautiful imperfections. Using a layer of plaster atop clay, the shells of Ueda’s vessels are built to crack and peel away revealing oozing, vivid glaze and cast forms that have been used in Japan since the Edo period.
Saijo creates ceramic forms that correspond to and create space for the human body. Often staging activations wherein performers breathe into or interface with her work, she calls attention to the unknowable and disjointed space of communication and perception that divides us all. Skillfully glazing her impeccably built forms, Saijo, like the other artists in Surface and Signal, plays with the evocative tension of achieving modes of perfection in our inherently disordered human experience.
Kazunori Hamana (b. 1969, Osaka, Japan) lives and works in Chiba, Japan. His work has been exhibited at public art institutions including the Okura Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan (2023); The Warehouse, Dallas, TX (2023); the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA (2021); Towada Art Center, Towada, Japan (2017); and Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, Japan (2016). His work is held in the public collections of BY ART MATTERS, Hangzhou, China; and The Rachofsky Collection, Dallas, TX.
Akane Saijo (b. 1989, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan) lives and works in Kyoto, Japan. She completed her BA in Fine Art and MA in Ceramics at Kyoto City University of Arts, Kyoto, Japan, and received the grand prize at the first edition of MIMOCA EYE at Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Kagawa, Japan in 2022. Her first museum solo exhibition, Akane Saijo—Double Touch, was held at the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art (MIMOCA) in early 2025. Her work is represented in the collections of the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Aichi, Japan; and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, among others. In fall 2025, Saijo’s work will be featured in A Time Between Ashes and Roses, part of the Aichi Triennale, followed by a solo exhibition at BLUM, Los Angeles in November.
Peter Shear (b. 1980, Beverly Farms, MA) lives and works in Bloomington, IN. His work was the subject of the solo exhibition Time Stamp at Herron School of Art + Design, Indiana University, Indianapolis, IN (2019). Group exhibitions include The Feminine In Abstract Painting, The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, New York, NY (2023); A Wild Note of Longing: Albert Pinkham Ryder and a Century of American Art, New Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford, MA (2021); Locus Focus: Peter Shear and Arvind Sundararajan, 840 Gallery, University of Cincinnati, OH (2018); and Basic Instinct, Peter Shear and Ellen Siebers, FJORD, Philadelphia, PA (2016). In 2025, he received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY.
Yuji Ueda (b. 1975, Shigaraki, Shiga Prefecture, Japan) comes from a family of award-winning tea farmers in the Shiga Prefecture town of Shigaraki, where he lives and works. His work has been included in prominent group exhibitions including Unearthed, Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA), Costa Mesa, CA; and Earth, Wind, and Fire: Visions of the Future from Asia, Okura Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan (2024).
Schedule | Jun 28 (Sat) 2025-Aug 2 (Sat) 2025 Opening Hours Information
Opening Reception Jun 28 (Sat) 2025 17:00 - 19:00 | ||||
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| Fee | Free | ||||
| Website | https://blum-gallery.com/exhibition?lang=eng&filename=1747268739671x690323951867134000 | ||||
| Venue | Blum https://blum-gallery.com/ | ||||
| Location | 5F Harajuku Jingu-no-mori, 1-14-34 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku , Tokyo 150-0001 | ||||
| Access | 1 minute walk from the Takeshita exit of Harajuku Station on the JR Yamanote line, 2 minute walk from exit 2 at Meiji-jingumae Station on the Chiyoda and Fukutoshin lines. | ||||
| Phone | 03-3475-1631 | ||||
| Related images | Click on the image to enlarge it |
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ねづ
こんな急すぎる閉まり方はさみしいな……。ド派手なクロージング展が見たかった😂