For centuries, Japanese people have admired the unique surfaces and shapes of tea bowls and other ceramic objects. They look not only at the colors, sheen or markings resulting from long kiln firings, but also at the places where thick or thin slips and glazes run and pool on the surfaces, creating impressions of mountains, rivers or crevices, as if natural landscapes. Sometimes the surfaces are ultra-smooth where winds seem to have blown away the sand, other times, plump vegetal forms give the suggestion of plants and forests. Sometimes heat cracks the clay body of a piece or impurities explode on its surface, creating even more the appearances of rocks or rough terrain.

"Landscapes" are called keshiki in Japanese. The appreciation for the tactile qualities of surfaces, shapes and markings – the broader usage of the word keshiki – can be carried over to other objects, including even fabrics. In Landscapes we invite the visitor to discover a wide range of forms and textures – tactile landscapes – in different colors, mediums and dimensions.

In Shuhei Yamada’s words, KUROOBIANACONDA’s leader who curated the exhibition together with Toru Ishii: "in Têmporas/テンプラ we will create an environment out of unconnected themes and media to intrigue the palate of the viewer. The show intends to be like a serving of Japanese Tempura, with its variety of fried vegetables and seafood accompanied by a piquant sauce. Tempura, a representative, even indispensable, dish in Japanese cuisine, was brought to Japan by the Portuguese. It is a symbol of cultural exchange and fusion. All the artists in the collective, who come from different backgrounds and regions of Japan, grew up absorbing modern western culture from movies to music, fashion to food. We hope our new variations on Tempura will appeal to the visitors.” The idea of serving art to the visitor, just like food, has been present in all of the group’s past exhibitions, whose titles were: Kirimi, which means fillet or slice, Wagiri, the word used for round slice and Sanmaioroshi, filleting fish.

This time the exhibition references a word of possible Portuguese origins— tempura. Têmporas is the name of the three-day periods at the beginning of each liturgical season once prescribed by the Catholic church, when people of faith should abstain from eating meat. It is thought that the 16th century Portuguese missionaries who visited Japan would cook a typical Portuguese dish “peixinhos da horta” (batter coated and deep-fried green beans) during these religious periods. Today, however, this period is no longer marked by the Church and most Portuguese people only know the word “têmporas” as referring to the body part temples.

Having more than 40 years of experience working with ceramics, Michikawa is one of the most acclaimed Japanese artists internationally. In his self-titled solo exhibition, Shozo Michikawa, the artist brings 15 artworks through which he invites the visitor to an energetic, dynamic and poetic journey to Japanese tradition and to his own life’s path and experience. It is an invitation to discover the artist’s exceptional and unconventional skills on the potter’s wheel, and to enjoy carefully selected glazes that best bring out the nature of each piece, from the snowy scenery of Kohiki glaze, to the volcanic ash appearance of the natural ash and charcoal firing. Each ceramic sculpture tells the story of itself and all the visitor has to do is find it.

The relationship of people with clay is an ancient one. Because clay is widely found in nature we have been using it since prehistory to produce tools that help us in our daily lives, or simply to create aesthetic forms that endlessly please or spiritually inspire us. Clay is an honorable material that has allowed human societies to advance and to extend their creativity. The shapes and colors we have given clay are so rich and diverse that we often forget how organic are the processes involving mountain formation, water, erosion, rocks, and sand. “Materials of the Earth” brings together three unique and very different artists to celebrate their connections to the elemental features of ceramic artworks.

Riding for a Fall is Kazuhito Kawai first solo exhibition with Sokyo Lisbon. Using a distinctive approach to ceramic, Kawai’s sculptures emerge like castles or vessels in which the extreme glaze overflows with nostalgic expression that holds and traps the artist’s emotions and concepts.

Paying particular attention to the environment that surrounds us – both physical and metaphysical – his works are deeply connected to landscape: “representing the land by the land itself”.

The exhibition Rivers introduces his work through a series of paintings made with sand collected along the Kamogawa River and the Seine, including an eight-minute video accompanying the artist work process between the Kamogawa's riverbed environs Kyoto and at the studio at Tama Art University in Tokyo.