Japanese glass artist and educator Rui Sasaki MFA 10 GL of Toyama, Japan has won the Irvin Borowsky International Prize in Glass from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Each year an international panel of glass experts awards the prize to an artist for work that is conceptually daring, technically strong and innovative, and advances the field of contemporary glass.
“My work is about the exploration and discovery of subtle intimacy in unfamiliar spaces: what I refer to as empty space,” Sasaki told the selection committee. “I want to bring attention to the moment when I discover who I am in this world of empty and dead space.”
In 2007, when she first left Japan to study at RISD, Sasaki says she “experienced sensations of lost memories, nostalgia and loss of home” – all now recurring themes in her work. Though she works primarily with cast glass and resin, the artist has also begun using her body for performance pieces, which she often documents via video and photography.
“This is the first year that we have had an international pool of applicants,” notes glass artist and RISD alum Alexander Rosenberg 06 GL, a prize committee member and coordinator of the Glass program at UArts. “Japan-based artist Sasaki’s selection of work stood out as uniquely ambitious, experimental in nature and [emblematic of the] blurring of boundaries in the field.”
Sasaki joins a prominent group of previous winners – including RISD-educated artists Matthew Szösz 96 GL/MFA 07, who won in 2015, and Sean Salstrom MFA 06 GL, a three-time nominee who also lives and work in Japan and this year earned one of two Juror’s Awards given to finalists.
In addition to collecting a $5,000 award, Sasaki will interact with UArts students in early November and will present the 2016 Irvin J. Borowsky Prize in Glass Arts Lecture on November 10.