OCTOBER 7th 2025
Copyright Kosuke Hamada
I slipped into TENGOKU—“Heaven”—on the first floor of Sogetsu Plaza and felt the room hum before I saw anything. Isamu Noguchi’s stone garden, the permanent stage for this space, set the tone: a hush of pale rocks and gravity, like a deep inhale before music starts. Into that calm, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy had tossed color and movement—large, luminous paintings leaning and hanging so they seemed to flirt with the stones—and a chorus of ceramics he made together with the show’s curator, Kazunori Hamana. The exhibition title, Heavenly Biches, is a wink and a citation; it riffs on *Les Biches*, the 1924 ballet, and you can feel the choreography in how the paintings and vessels pirouette through the garden. It ran just four days, September 9–12, 2025, brief as a performance: 10:00–17:00 most days, closing at 15:00 on the last—blink and you’d miss it.
The players: Lutz-Kinoy at the conductors stand, with Hamana not just curating but co-authoring the clay—those ceramics looked like they still remembered the kiln’s breath. Eiko Ishibashi appeared as a live presence, her performance threading sound through the gravel and paint so delicately it felt like drawing on water. There was even ikebana—an arrangement by Yosuke Yamaguchi—that quietly tuned the room’s frequency back to plants and stems. And presiding in stone, Noguchi, whose garden is less backdrop and more collaborator. The show was sited specifically in TENGOKU (Heaven), Sogetsu Plaza, inside Sogetsu Kaikan Ikebana school founded by Sofu Teshigahara.
Material matter. Paintings—big ones—carried a stagey, balletic energy, their surfaces almost breathing against the stone. The ceramics, made in tandem with Hamana during an artist residency connected to his project of restoring traditional rural houses, felt like they held that countryside air inside their glazes. Together, painting and clay didn’t oppose Noguchi’s “Heaven”; they activated it. The exhibition was an autonomous, artist-curated project; a space where artists could mingle freely, without over-explaining themselves. I left with grit on my shoes and the sense that the show had happened more *to* the garden than *in* it—an encounter rather than a display.
On the train home tp Chiba I kept thinking about time: a four-day window, a century-old ballet, a postwar stone garden, fresh clay cooled last week. The paintings flashed behind my eyes like costumes mid-spin, while Ishibashi’s flute kept resolving into the splash of the fountains water and then back into music. Heavenly Biches felt like a short, precise breath—one of those moments when art briefly reorganizes a place you thought you knew. When the doors closed at 15:00 on Friday, the garden was still there, of course; but for a few days, “Heaven” had learned some new steps.
(Exhibition: “Heavenly Biches”, Sep 9–12, 2025; TENGOKU (Heaven), Sogetsu Plaza) https://mendeswooddm.com/news/132-heavenly-biches-matthew-lutz-kinoy