The prize winners of the 73rd Japan Traditional K\u014dgei Exhibition were announced on 15 August 2026. Led by the Japan K\u014dgei Association President’s Prize, awarded to Toshie \u014cki’s bamboo flower basket T\u014dsei (“Sound of Waves”), a total of sixteen prize-winning works have been made public across seven categories: ceramics, textiles, lacquer (shitsugei), metalwork, wood and bamboo (mokuchikk\u014d), dolls, and other crafts (shok\u014dgei).<\/p>\n
Checking the list of winners and titles alone, though, doesn’t reveal what is happening in Japanese craft in 2026.<\/p>\n
What matters when looking at the winning works isn’t the ranking of prizes, but how material, technique, form, and surface relate to one another to make a single work hold together.<\/b><\/p>\n
The 73rd Japan Traditional K\u014dgei Exhibition runs from 2 to 15 September 2026 at Nihonbashi Mitsukoshi in Tokyo, before touring the country. This article keeps the dates and access details to a minimum and uses the sixteen officially announced prize works as a way into reading “where technique stands now” across the seven categories.<\/p>\n
Note that the Japan K\u014dgei Association’s published list of winners gives the prize, title, maker, and an image for each work, but individual jury reasoning has not been published for every work. In this article, we keep the official prize results and Kogei Japonica’s own viewing and analysis clearly separate.<\/b>
\uff08Source\uff1a73rd Japan Traditional K\u014dgei Exhibition: list of prize-winning works | Japan K\u014dgei Association<\/a>\uff09<\/p>\n
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