One of Japan's most internationally visible stone sculptors has returned to Tokyo after a long absence. ShugoArts opened a solo exhibition by Kan Yasuda on October 16, 2026, on view through November 28. It is his first solo presentation in the city in 25 years, following a 2001-2002 exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum.

Yasuda left Japan for Rome in 1970 at the age of 25 and studied under the figurative sculptor Pericle Fazzini, absorbing the fundamentals of the Italian tradition. An encounter with Michelangelo's unfinished Rondanini Pieta redirected him: the spirituality embedded in that late work, overpowering its form, set the course for his own practice. He later settled in Pietrasanta, near the marble quarries of Carrara, where he continues to carve. His large-scale outdoor projects have occupied some of Europe's most charged historic sites: the Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi in 2005, the Roman Forum in 2007-2008, and city centers in Milan, Florence, and Pisa. Last year he received the Isamu Noguchi Award from the Noguchi Museum in New York, and this year he presented work at the Wilmotte Foundation's exhibition staged alongside the Venice Biennale.

The Tokyo show centers on white marble works, including Tenpi, IsinkI, and Myomu, pieces the gallery describes as representative of his mature language. A second room holds a monumental Tenpi large enough to receive the human body, conceived as a rising and falling mass that visitors are invited not only to look at but to touch, sit on, and lie against. Yasuda's sculptures have always courted that openness: children run toward them instinctively, and adults settle onto them to rest.

For the artist, the work aims beyond the physical, toward a sense of time that outlasts the body. The exhibition's title translates roughly as 'when the heart touches form': an invitation, in the gallery's words, to feel for a moment the invisible thing that resides within the stone.