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 created as a commissioned piece for this museum. It belongs to Rui Sasaki’s ongoing series Subtle Intimacy, in which plants are placed between two sheets of glass and fused together through high-temperature firing. As the glass is reheated, the two panels bond to one another, while the plant matter enclosed between them burns away, losing its form as it transforms into water and ash. Yet during this process of combustion, the minute structures of the plants—down to the finest veins and roots—are imprinted onto the interior of the glass as delicate white ash traces, preserving vivid afterimages of their original forms.
The moisture once contained within the plants produces bubbles as it is heated. These bubbles remain suspended within the glass as countless particles that diffuse the light, causing the botanical traces to appear even more vividly before the viewer’s eyes. For this work, the artist collected plants from the grounds of the Shibuya Kyoiku Gakuen, an institution closely associated with the museum, and incorporated them into the piece.
Although glass possesses a transparent and fragile appearance, it is, in nature, an extremely stable material that does not biodegrade and is said to survive for periods measured in millions of years. Sasaki focuses on this dual nature of glass, seeking to entrust plants with a form of memory and preserve it through the material’s transparency and permanence. The plants burned within Sasaki’s works do not simply disappear into ash together with their memories; rather, by transforming into inorganic ash that can no longer decompose, they are protected within this transparent medium and remain preserved in a semi-permanent state.
