Aichi Triennale 2025, “A Time Between Ashes and Roses”

Prominent visual cues evoke a state of uneasy in-betweenness. Daisuke Igarashi’s illustration of a pink rose springing from skull-strewn rubble—the key visual of this edition of the Aichi Triennale—suggests a despoiled yet salvageable environment, and an artwork displayed in the tenth-floor entrance of the main venue, the Aichi Arts Center, envelops us in one. Crocheted by women in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, Mulyana’s fabric installation Between Currents and Bloom (2019–present) features corals, marine mammals, and schools of fish in a cute yet evidently stressed seabed—half is bleached white, half pops with lysergic color. Amid the reef’s patchy desiccation, unseen energies still seem to swirl.

While this installation announces an overarching preoccupation with planetary care, a quote widens this triennale’s aperture, allowing different shades of precarity and potential to pour in. Spread across Aichi Arts Center, a ceramics museum, and Seto, a nearby city famous for ceramics, “A Time Between Ashes and Roses” draws its title from Syrian poet Adonis’s lament for the environmental destruction caused by the Six-Day War—verses, written in 1970, that resonate with the obliteration of Gaza but which artistic director Hoor Al Qasimi frames in dimly hopeful, allegorical terms.1

Her essay’s claim that “it is not all gloom for Adonis, as after extinction comes blossoming” may not sit well with the hellscape conditions in the Strip (conditions that Al Qasimi addressed at the opening via public statements and intentional programming).2 Yet it clears a rhetorical path for a show that invokes manifold forms of strife—wars being waged “on the planet,” “within ourselves,” on “hierarchy, resources, oppression” and so on—and aligns itself with Adonis’s “geologic and everlasting time view.” The aim, Al Qasimi writes, is “to decenter both the apocalyptic and optimistic extremes we find ourselves compelled to run to.”

She invokes the Anthropocene and its conceptual alternatives, as well as their surrounding jargon (“human-environment entanglement,” for example). So it is no surprise to find several installations chastening our exceptionalism by centering nonhuman narratives. Birds, rats, and lizards bathe in bins and drink from drains in Robert Zhao Renhui’s The Owl, The Travellers and the Cement Drain (2024), a two-channel video shot using motion sensors installed in Singapore’s secondary forests—lands squeezed by urban development. In another room, Koretsune Sakura’s After Efflorescence: Awakening the Whale Beneath Us (2025) makes flesh the history of whaling in Aichi Prefecture with a deconstructed carcass comprising found bones and local ceramics. Next to it, John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea (2015), which juxtaposes images of whaling with footage of Black bodies being thrown off ships and polar bears being stalked, forms a searing companion piece.

Despite the sterility of the Aichi Arts Center, many works benefit from having a sealed room to themselves, while the conversations between those that don’t are occasionally captivating. The capacity for childlike wonder evident in the collective Ohkojima Maki’s psychedelic hanging, which pits animals against swarming elements and chimeras (Tomorrows Harvest, 2017–18), is complemented by Wendy Hubert’s absorbing, dreamlike paintings of the Yindjibarndi people’s homelands in Western Australia, which line the wall opposite. Next door, a more jaundiced atmosphere surfaces: Sugimoto Hiroshi’s black-and-white photographs of dioramas at American natural history museums—such as foraging vultures and socializing white-mantled colobus monkeys—alternate with Miyamoto Saburo and Ota Saburo’s mural paintings of a teeming African savanna and thriving Arctic. The former have an unnerving, beyond-lifelike quality; the latter were commissioned by Higashiyama Zoo in the late 1940s, the wall text explains, to compensate for the empty enclosures resulting from the final stages of World War II, when fears that the zoo’s animals could escape after air raids led to their culling.

Callbacks to the history of Aichi Prefecture (and wider Japan) are as plentiful as engagements with its traditional culture. While past editions centered Aichi’s car industry (2019’s “Taming Y/Our Passion”) or took a wide-angle look at its crafts (2022’s “Still Alive”), this one has alighted on the region’s status as the heartland of seto ware, a type of pottery, as a topic of enquiry and form of praxis. Consequently, many new commissions feature locally produced pottery, while several projects at the Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum mine personal themes, from autoethnographic research to feminist mysticism, through clay. Marilyn Boror Bor’s ceramic jugs, for example, overflow with a concrete that appears to puddle on a vitrine floor (“Our mountain has been taken, and cement was brought in,” 2023/25)—a commentary on the disruption to the water supply and indigenous ways of life caused by the arrival of a cement plant in her city in Guatemala.

Others lead us to ponder the environmental and human cost of the craft. Saijo Akane’s biomorphic sculptures, with their pitted glazes and fleshy valves resembling trumpet horns and organ pipes, attest to the taxing labor through which artisans imbue their objects with physicality (The Pomegranate of Sisyphus, 2025). And Hive Earth’s The Rammed Earth Project in Seto “Convex” (2025) is a thought-provoking, if formally uninspiring, site-specific project: the rammed earth this Ghana-based collective have used to make a brittle seating stand in the courtyard of the museum’s studio will, at the end, be put back into a hole by the car park. This gesture on the grounds of a ceramic museum seems to pose the tough questions being asked by some ceramicists. What does it mean to work with clay in the Anthropocene? Does pottery reconnect us with the Earth and nature, or distance us? With other works broaching deep time and links between seto ware and Japan’s defunct coal mines, Aichi Triennale 2025 invites such material-led reflections on the ethics of extraction and future pathways as they pertain to art and craft more generally—and, in doing so, implicates itself.

Another question tacitly posed is: What does it mean to make a mega-exhibition while a war and its aftermath plays out in real time? Al Qasimi, the event’s first non-Japanese director (but who speaks Japanese), has clearly thought long and hard about this question. One answer has to do with representation: a smattering of work from or about the Middle East, much of it concerning the fallout of war, supplements the heavy lean towards Asia and the Global South. In a wholesale store in Seto, for example, Michael Rakowitz has recreated sections of an ancient Assyrian palace destroyed by ISIS (The invisible enemy should not exist, 2023). Back at the Aichi Arts Center, Hrair Sarkissian is displaying forty-eight lithophanes, each depicting a cultural artifact looted in Syria’s civil war (Stolen Past, 2025), and Bassim Al Shaker’s effervescent oil paintings abstractly recall the Iraq War, specifically the instant after an aerial bombardment.

The other answer also relates to optics—namely, gestures of solidarity designed to situate a show about the long arc of environmental history in the political moment. First and foremost, there were Al Qasimi’s calls for a “Free Palestine” during the opening ceremony, which were immediately followed by a small public protest in the foyer.3 Then came her scheduling of a nightclub performance by musicians, sound designers, and rappers from Palestine a few hours later. Pairing processed vocals with electronic beats, emancipatory slogans, and raw footage shot in landscapes threatened by settlers, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s Enemy of the Sun (2025) was a pugnacious (albeit dance floor–friendly) assault on the senses, its politics as visceral as its rhythms. As such, it felt like an outlier in the triennale’s performing arts program (the same goes for Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s formidable installation in the main show). Still, its front-loading into the opening festivities did serve a purpose, turned up the volume on what is, for Al Qasimi, a live subject: the tension between activism and spectacle.