SOM GALLERY is pleased to present In the Time of Clay, a solo exhibition by Akihiro Nikaido on view from November 26 to December 28, 2025.
The exhibition revisits one of humanity’s oldest relationships—that between earth and vessel—while reconfiguring the interrelations of material, life, form, and time through the dual archetypes of “seed” and “vessel.”

Born in Sapporo, Hokkaido in 1977, Nikaido graduated from the Ceramics Department of the Bunka Gakuin Art College in 1999, established his own studio in 2001, and relocated to Mashiko—one of Japan’s historic pottery centers—in 2002. Now based in the mountains of Izu, Shizuoka, he works primarily with Mashiko clay and wood-fired kilns. His practice is distinguished by vessels of remarkable thinness that reveal the breath, heat, and temporal strata inherent in clay itself. For Nikaido, a work is never completed at the moment of its making; it continues to evolve through the gestures of its user and the passage of time. Each vessel exists not as a fixed object but as a relational field that matures through interaction—a philosophy that lies at the core of his aesthetics. In recent years, he has held solo exhibitions in New York, Paris, Taipei, Shanghai, and Beijing, expanding his international presence.

The installation presented in this exhibition takes rice husk and seed rice as motifs to reconsider the vessel’s fundamental functions—to contain and to hold. The husk, as an outer shell that has already fulfilled its role, signifies the void or residual space, while the seed embodies latent potential and the initiation of becoming. This juxtaposition mediates between nature and artifice, material and action, visibility and invisibility—illuminating Nikaido’s practice as one grounded in the collaboration between matter and the body.

The surfaces of fired clay, lightly covered with slip, register irreversible transformations—oxidation, carbonization, and the transit of heat—inscribing time into the very structure of the material. The vessels, formed to the verge of fragility, expose thresholds between tension and collapse, intention and chance, plan and deviation. Here, clay functions not merely as a technical medium but as an archive of time and action, an index of process. Accordingly, the work is presented not as a completed object but as an open field encompassing becoming, transformation, and decay. Within the exhibition space, viewers encounter an expanded understanding of the vessel—an experience of form that is simultaneously tactile and temporal.

The exhibition also stages a dialogue between a sensitivity to origins and a contemporary reflection on form. The traces of earth, fire, and hand evoke a deep stratum of memory connecting humans and nature, while offering a response to the increasingly institutionalized and de-corporealized conditions of artistic production today. Grounded in sensibilities of wabi-sabi and the beauty of void, Nikaido locates within the acts of using, changing, and continuing a new conceptual framework that links craft and contemporary art. His practice seeks not so much a renewal of form as a renewal of relation—a reconfiguration of perception among material, action, time, and viewer.