At A Lighthouse called Kanata, an Omotesando gallery founded and run by Wahei Aoyama, architecture is the first indication that this is no conventional contemporary gallery. Visitors walk through a dark corridor for 30 seconds — long enough, Aoyama says, to disorient — before arriving at a main room clad floor to ceiling in travertine, where sculptures emerge from stone in columns of light.

It is a deliberate antithesis of the white cube, the blank, evenly lit format that dominates contemporary galleries and is designed to recede behind whatever it contains. Aoyama has, instead, designed a gallery that refuses to pretend the conditions in which we encounter art are neutral.

Aoyama has spent nearly two decades championing Japanese artists whose work prizes material, technique and beauty — qualities he believes contemporary art has increasingly left behind. Through his gallery, he is trying to win those artists recognition abroad and, ultimately, greater recognition back at home.

Steel and Sincerity

The ideas that would eventually shape A Lighthouse called Kanata began to crystallize during Aoyama’s years abroad. Though he was reading law at Oxford with plans to enter politics, he spent much of his free time in museums. A Jackson Pollock retrospective at MoMA proved formative, as did the relative absence of Japanese contemporary artists from the major institutions he visited. He came to see an art world still largely organized around a Western narrative and grew increasingly skeptical of the direction contemporary art itself was taking.

“What is the meaning of art?” he remembers wondering.

He finds one answer in the work of sculptor Satoru Ozaki, whose work A Lighthouse called Kanata represents. Ozaki creates each of his stainless-steel sculptures by himself from start to finish. He hammers the metal by hand — a practice Aoyama says is prohibited at Ozaki’s alma mater, Tokyo University of the Arts, because the material is hard enough to damage the elbow — and then undertakes the painstaking process of polishing it to a mirror finish. Aoyama contrasts this with artists like Anish Kapoor, whose celebrated polished-steel sculptures are produced with outside fabricators, including in Japan. Both may require extraordinary craftsmanship. The distinction, for Aoyama, is whose hands perform it.

“With each strike of the hammer, he’s breathing an energy into that work that other people can’t do just by fabrication or by pressing it with a press machine,” Aoyama says.

He means this almost literally. Aoyama recalls a seminar with Jeremy Irons, where the actor pointed out that even apparently inert objects are alive with molecular motion. Irons suggested that something similar happens when we make things: The effort of the maker leaves a kind of presence in the finished work. For Aoyama, two visually identical objects are therefore not necessarily equivalent, because the artist’s physical engagement with the material becomes part of the work itself.

The Long Way Home

This value, he says, has found a receptive audience abroad. What frustrates him is that the same recognition has proved harder to win at home. Aoyama traces this partly to Japan’s 19th-century Westernization, when imported categories of “fine art” and “craft” redrew the boundaries of what counted as art. The makers of Buddhist sculptures and paintings that are now considered national treasures, he points out, were once understood as craftsmen rather than artists.

To Aoyama, this reflects a broader pattern: Japan often recognizes the value of its own culture only after the rest of the world does. Ukiyo-e found fervent admirers in Europe while prints were being used as wrapping paper at home; centuries later, American collector Joe Price helped bring renewed attention to the now-renowned painter Ito Jakuchu.

A Lighthouse called Kanata is built around reversing that pattern. Aoyama takes artists he believes are undervalued in Japan to fairs, institutions and collectors abroad, hoping that international recognition will eventually travel home, a process he calls “re-importation.” The idea is embedded in the gallery’s name: a lighthouse casting its beam outward from Japan, toward the kanata, or distance beyond, while illuminating what might otherwise remain unseen at home.

The Material Commitment

For all the idealism of Aoyama’s philosophy, his commitment to it is strikingly concrete. The gallery has grown from zero employees to 24 and now exhibits at Frieze, Art Basel and TEFAF. He personally selects each work, frequently commissions new pieces and, rather than operating on consignment, often purchases them outright.

“What are we doing if we can’t pay these artists, so that they can make a living?” he asks. “Whatever I ask them to do, I will put my money where my mouth is, and I’ll buy it outright.”

That combination of close curatorial control and material commitment to his artists will be on full display this fall, when A Lighthouse called Kanata marks its first anniversary in Omotesando with an event titled Ars Longa. For the occasion, the gallery will open its normally appointment-only second floor, rooftop and VIP lounge to the public. The title comes from the Latin aphorism “ars longa, vita brevis” — art is long, life is short — and among its centerpieces is Satoru Ozaki’s roughly 2-meter “A Letter from the Forest”, a rare large-scale work Aoyama says has been difficult to keep in Japan long enough to exhibit, since Ozaki’s major pieces tend to sell quickly abroad. 

November brings a solo show by Nihonga painter Ayane Mikagi, whose work pushes the materials of traditional Japanese painting into abstraction, followed in December by sculptor Shogo Watari, whose laminated bentwood forms draw on traditions of Japanese woodworking. Both, in different ways, occupy the territory Aoyama wants Kanata to claim: grounded in exacting material traditions without being confined by the category of craft. Together, they give form to his larger ambition — that work like theirs will eventually hang on the walls of the world’s major museums, and that recognition, having traveled so far, will eventually find its way home.

More Info

To learn more about A Lighthouse called Kanata, please visit lighthouse-kanata.com/en/.