Leaves of Words: Satoshi Nemoto, Tsuneo Nakazawa, Shinya Yamamura

Exhibition opens Thursday, october 29, 2026

• Opening Reception at 35 N Moore Street, TriBeCa: October 29, 2026, 5–8 PM
• Private viewing by appointment only.

NEW YORK, NY – Ippodo Gallery is pleased to present Leaves of Words: Satoshi Nemoto, Tsuneo Nakazawa, Shinya Yamamura, at Ippodo Gallery in TriBeCa, New York from October 29 to December 5, 2026.  The exhibition follows a single script across three materials and three hands: the brush of calligrapher Satoshi Nemoto, the forged iron of Tsuneo Nakazawa, and the mother-of-pearl inlay of lacquer master Shinya Yamamura.

"Japanese poetry takes the human heart as its seed and grows into myriad leaves of words." So begins the Kana Preface to the Kokin Wakashū, written by Ki no Tsurayuki around 905 — the first work of literary criticism ever composed in kana, and the sentence that gives this exhibition both its title and its argument.

Kana emerged in the ninth century, when Japanese writers began abbreviating Chinese characters into a phonetic script of their own. In the Heian court it flourished as the language of poetry and of love letters — supple, cursive, written in a single continuous breath, as much drawing as writing. A thousand years later it remains the writing of ordinary Japanese life: the script of a grocery list, a text message, a child's first name. Few writing systems carry so much refinement so lightly.

The premise of this exhibition is that kana is a line before it is a language. A visitor who reads no Japanese can still follow the speed of a stroke, the hesitation before a descent, the space a writer chose to leave empty. Here that line is lifted off the page — hammered into iron, where it gains weight and throws a shadow; set into lacquer, where it catches the light in shifting color. Three materials, one thousand-year-old hand.

Satoshi Nemoto

Nemoto inherits the tradition directly. He works with traditional brushes and rare washi by the same methods used in the Heian period, and his strokes move like landscape — water, branch, wind, carrying the elegance of classical literature into the present. For this exhibition he presents twelve works, from intimate sheets to major compositions, forming the Flow series and built upon two waka of his own composition:

Woven by threads of rain, the flower opens into color; from a heart so dyed, the leaves of words are spun.

In moonlight leaking through the trees — is it the presence of blossoms, or the breath of the branches?

Tsuneo Nakazawa

For the second body of work, Nemoto selected classical waka on the moon and on yūgen — the elusive depth prized by the poets of the Heian and Kamakura courts — drawing from the Kokin Wakashū, the Shin Kokin Wakashū, and the Shin Chokusen Wakashū, including verses by Saigyō, Fujiwara no Ietaka, Fujiwara no Yoshitsune, and Ōe no Chisato. Nemoto brushed each poem; Nakazawa then forged the writing into three dimensions. Approximately ten works in hammered iron are on view. Lit from the side, each throws a second calligraphy onto the wall behind it — a shadow that shifts as the viewer moves. Tsurayuki's closing words to the Kana Preface, that one who grasps the heart of poetry looks back to the past and longs for the present as one gazes at the moon in a wide sky, appear here at full scale.

Shinya Yamamura

Yamamura, a master of urushi lacquer, contributes a small group of lidded boxes in which kana characters are set in raden, mother-of-pearl inlay. Held in the hand and turned toward the light, the letters flare in shifting iridescence — a thousand years of literature at the scale of a palm.

Together the three artists trace one script from brush to iron to lacquer, and one idea from the ninth century to the present. Ippodo Gallery has worked for three decades as a cultural bridge to Japan's living master artists; Leaves of Words extends that work to the most intimate of the Japanese arts — the written line, and the feeling it carries before it carries meaning.

The exhibition is accompanied by an essay on Nemoto's work by Sadako Ohki, Ph.D., former Japan Foundation Associate Curator of Japanese Art, Department of Asian Art, Yale University Art Gallery.