Meditation on Glass Yoichi Ohira  1946–

I have loved glass since I was a little boy. In its transparency, it seemed like I could see–and not see. It gave me a glimpse of the mysterious purity of nature: the sky, the stars, the crisp clean air, the pure water, the white snow. When I was 20 years old, while reading a book by the Japanese writer Hiroyuki Itsuki, a novel about the love between a Japanese glassmaker and a Finnish glass dealer, I discovered an extraordinary poetic connection between the transparency of glass and the “music without a sound.” It was the kind of music that one hears with the eyes and with the heart–not with the ears. Since that moment, glass became for me synonymous with sublimated love. At 22, I was hired as an apprentice by the Kagami Crystal Company, a very well-known artistic glass workshop in Tokyo. I worked as a glassmaker so I could understand this medium directly. While at Kagami, I saw a television program on the making of glass in Murano. I was fascinated by this island so foreign and mysterious. A few days later I went to the library of the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Tokyo and found a book on the island of Murano. As I studied the many beautiful color illustrations, I was captured by the beauty of Muranese glass: Here is where I must go I said to myself. I have been living in Venice for the past 27 years, where I spend most of my time creating my glassworks with passion, and of course, in collaboration with two excellent maestri, the soffiatore Livio Serena, known as Maisasio and the molatore Giacomo Barbini. What is the ideal piece of glass for me? It is a gorgeous vase that can contain a sip of the “magic water of life” and perchance, will allow me to hear “music without a sound.”