How The Craft of Kawai Kanjirō Teaches Us to Find Beauty in the Unknown

The interior of the home offers about as much explanation as the exterior. In the folk tradition of anonymity and embracing the unknown, few signs exist—in Japanese or English—to tell you where to go, or what you’re looking at. You’re entering someone’s home, after all, and while you will find a few of the expected museum displays and exhibition labels throughout the two floors, I can imagine that the overall experience of the house is much the same as when the artist lived, worked, and fired his massive eight-chamber noborigama climbing kiln here from 1937 until his death in 1966.

Who was Kawai Kanjirō?

Kanjirō is best known for his role in establishing Japan’s mingei (folk art), alongside his friends, philosopher and art critic Sōetsu Yanagi (1889–1961) and potter Shōji Hamada (1894–1978), as well as British studio potter, Bernard Leach, who helped translate and disseminate the movement’s work and philosophies to Western audiences. Largely considered a reaction to Japan’s rapid, post-Meiji restoration modernization, mingei (or “art of the people”) established a new standard of beauty that the founders believed could only be located in the utilitarian, everyday objects made by Japan’s ordinary, often anonymous, craftspeople, rather than renowned individual artists or master craftsmen. 

I received an introduction to the Mingei movement through Western art academies, including a brief stint working at the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum, where I physically handled and helped catalog many jewels of folk and studio pottery movements world-wide. But I didn’t learn about Kawai Kanjirō until I visited his Kyoto home in March. This isn’t because he was less productive than his counterparts or was somehow less influential to the mingei movement, but likely because Kanjirō himself never stepped foot inside the United States during his lifetime, nor did he ever exhibit work in the country. In fact, most of his pieces have never left Japan—until now, exactly 100 years after the movement was conceived.

For the first time, the Japan Society in New York presents a solo exhibition celebrating the potter and national treasure’s life and work, bringing his private collection of ceramics, woodwork, and calligraphy from his former house in Kyoto to Manhattan’s “Japan House.” The title, Kawai Kanjiro: House to House, (on view through May 10, 2026) is a celebration of this milestone international exchange of culture and art.

Mingei From Kyoto to Manhattan

Curated by Michele Bambling, gallery senior director at the Japan Society and Tamae Sagi, curator of the Kawai Kanjirō House and granddaughter of Kanjirō, House to House explores the artist’s oeuvre through the lens of his home, which they describe as his “largest and most comprehensive creative work.” Designed by Kanjirō himself (and built by his brother, a master carpenter) the house is a living example of the mingei movement.

“From the outside, one could never guess what a vast storehouse of art lies beyond the door,” friend and Japanese American writer Yoshiko Uchida wrote in 1953, and excerpted in We Do Not Work Alone, slim copper-colored volume that can be purchased at the museum in Kyoto and at Japan Society. Today, the same is true: Stepping into the house feels like entering a time-capsule of twentieth century Japanese craft. When exploring its grounds, one can feel the artists’ emphasis on the importance of everyday objects.

“One is immediately impressed by [the house’s] massiveness and sturdiness,” wrote Uchida. “There is nothing flimsy or unstable about it.” The Japan Society evokes this sentiment through the display of a large section drawing that shows the mechanics of the home, alongside another wall of perspective sketches and photographs of the interior of the house (made in situ by the Rome-based exhibition designers, Milk Train.)

These prints highlight not only the building’s architecture, but the trove of furniture and objects one can find throughout the house—a Bamboo stool that when turned sideways is transformed into a chair for children, barrel-shaped straw stools, squat chairs made from old wooden mortars for pounding ice, an alcove desk, his two potter’s wheels—most of which was designed and made by Kanjirō himself. The drawing even depicts the friendly tortoiseshell house cat that greeted me during my visit, patiently sitting through visitor photoshoots and mewing at me to let her into the house when I re-entered from the courtyard kiln area.

Japan Society’s main gallery presents Kanjirō’s ceramics chronologically, from his earlier Chinese and Korean inspired works, to his later, more abstract and asymmetrical vessels splashed with his signature, hand-mixed copper, iron, and cobalt glazes. The last room is dedicated to the artist’s experimental late-career wooden sculptures and masks that echo the same motifs as his ceramics—hands pointing to the sky, figures from Japanese folklore, and of course, cats.

The white display tables and cases throughout the galleries were designed to evoke the joinery of the Kyoto home’s construction, and the various heights of the tables allude to the different heights at which works are arranged throughout the home’s interior. On the walls surrounding the tables, visitors will see a selection of Kanjirō’s 1960s calligraphy of poems that read as Zen meditations. One, in particular, stands out: “The eyes hear; the ears see.”