Keiji

Keiji Okushima discovered glass at twenty through an encounter with a museum collection that rerouted his sense of what the medium was capable of. He had not planned to go into craftwork; it was glass itself — the way it holds light from within, the silence in its surface — that made the choice for him. The years that followed were spent learning from the ground up. While moving through different regions and studios he experimented with various mediums, including dyeing, before truly settling on glass as the material capable of carrying everything he wanted to say about the world.

Keiji now makes his home on the shore of Japan’s largest lake, Lake Biwa, where scenic mists and plays of light upon the water have fascinated Japanese artists and poets for centuries. The choice of a lakeshore spot in Takashima, Shiga Prefecture, is not incidental. Alongside his practice as a glass artist, Keiji studies tea ceremony and shugendo (a form of Japanese mountain asceticism that weaves together Buddhist, Shinto, and animist traditions), and both disciplines feed directly into his studio work. Tea has led him to create glass tea utensils that straddle the boundary between function and art, while shugendo has deepened his relationship to the sacred as creative subject matter.

Glass, for him, is an instrument of perception: a way of approaching landscapes that do not yet exist, and of making vessels for things that have no other form.