Seikou Takeda

Seikou Takeda(1942–2010) is known as a glass craft artist who pursued a distinctive form of expression using the pâte de verre technique.

After studying Japanese-style painting (nihonga) at Tokyo University of the Arts, he came into contact with glass fragments in the workshop of his wife, who worked in glass craft, and this experience gave him the idea of dissolving mineral pigments (iwa-enogu) — themselves minerals, like glass — into glass. After five years of trial and error, he developed his own original form of pâte de verre.

His works are held in the collections of institutions including the University Art Museum of Tokyo University of the Arts and the Yamanashi Prefectural Museum of Art. Building on the traditional pâte de verre technique passed down since ancient times, Takeda Seikō pursued a distinctive form of expression that combined glass forming with mineral pigments.

Many of his works take the four seasons of Japan as their motif, and drawing on the delicate sense of color he cultivated through nihonga, he formed a fantastical world through pale, ephemeral hues such as pink, celadon, and wisteria.

Pâte de verre is a glass technique believed to have originated in ancient Mesopotamia. It is an extremely labor-intensive method in which granules of glass are mixed with a binder and packed into a mold, the whole mold is fired, and the mold is then broken away to reveal the glass. The technique once disappeared with the invention of glassblowing, but was revived in France during the Art Nouveau period at the end of the 19th century. Seikou Takeda pursued his own distinctive glass expression using this technique with its long history.

Major Exhibitions
2016 "Fantasy of Water and Light" (水と光の幻想)
Senju Hiroshi (nihonga) × Takeda Seikō (glass)
Tōin-dō Hall, National Treasure, Yakushi-ji Temple, Nara