Jiro Okura: A Line of Breath Between Wood and Light

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Courtesy Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech

A survey of late Japanese minimalist sculptor Jiro Okura (1936-2014) reconnects an underseen international figure with the Appalachian site that shaped a pivotal body of work.

This exhibition revisits the legacy of the experimental Mountain Lake Workshops founded in the 1980s, contextualizing projects by artists such as Ray Kass and John Cage and highlighting research and conservation initiatives.

Okura's minimalist practice bridged Eastern and Western traditions. Born in Tokyo and long active in Kyoto, Okura was a key participant in the Mountain Lake Workshop’s Japan-U.S. exchange during the 1990s, bringing to Southwest Virginia a sensibility informed by Zen aesthetics, calligraphy, and postwar experimentation. This exhibition  illuminates his belief that art should hover between visibility and disappearance, “like breath or light filtering through paper.”

The Ruth C. Horton Gallery features Mountain Lake Screen Tachi (1990–1991), monumental black walnut folding screens created in collaboration with Virginia Tech’s Forest Products Lab, students, and community members.

The Miles C. Horton Jr. Gallery and Sherwood Payne Quillen ’71 Reception Gallery present Souls on Garbage (1998), a large-scale installation of discarded objects coated in white latex and unified with black lacquer lines, an elegiac meditation on ritual, repair, and the personal traces embedded in forgotten materials. Low-relief wall sculptures from the 1980s, their incised surfaces catching and releasing light, reveal the beginnings of Okura's inquiry into impermanence and the perceptual play of light and shadow.

A Line of Breath Between Wood and Light highlights the continuing relevance of Southwest Virginia’s Mountain Lake Workshop and brings wider attention to an artist who merged rawness and delicacy, presence and absence.

Admission is free during regular hours: Tuesday-Friday, 10 AM-5 PM* | Saturday, 10 AM-4 PM*

*during exhibition run dates