5 Must-See Gallery Exhibitions in Paris

In the Light of Aiko Miyanaga at Le Clézio Gallery

 

See all images

It is the result of an intimate and poetic experience, captured in a few fragile and eternal sculptures. Aiko Miyanaga (born in 1974) had never dared to touch the wooden crates that had languished in the family workshop. Then, one day in 2020, the sculptor discovered, inside, incomplete, heavy, white two-part plaster molds from Sèvres, once belonging to her great-grandfather, Tozan Miyanaga. This ancestor was one of the exhibition coordinators of the Japanese Pavilion at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair and had collaborated with the ceramist Numata Ichiga, the only Japanese artist at the time to study at the Sèvres factory. This past now crystallizes in Aiko Miyanaga’s first exhibition in France, organized by Le Clézio Gallery. In it, the artist highlights her works in glass and naphthalene, her material of choice, breathing new life into animal forms that had been dormant for over a century: “The absent forms that had long slept in Kyoto are now, in Paris, connected across past, present, and future,” she notes.

Aiko Miyanaga - 1900-2025: Breath of light