The Japan Foundation, Los Angeles

Tea Ceremony with Pacific Plastics is a UCLA-based interdisciplinary research initiative that uses chanoyu (tea ceremony) as a lens to explore histories of East-West cultural exchange and contemporary ecological issues in the Pacific Ocean. This summer exhibition will showcase ocean-inspired tea utensils created by the collective in collaboration with various artists, an up-cycled tea room, and a small zen garden made entirely from shopping bags and salvaged ocean plastics.

Sound of Water features paintings, prints, and sculptures by six Japanese women artists: Emiko Aida, Miya Ando, Yumiko Glover, Mineko Grimmer, Margaret Yuko Kimura, and Ayomi Yoshida. Their works explore water’s many moods and manifestations —serene and soft, yet also powerful and unpredictable.

This exhibition brings together seven Japanese and Japanese American artists who approach ceramics not as vessels for utility or tradition, but as sculptural sites of flux. Through bending, pressing, collapsing, and building, their works foreground the artists’ physicality and material processes, capturing the moment where form holds movement and stillness pulses with memory.