7.7 billion stories are happening on this planet right now at the same time. These are concurrent and endless stories… You may be happy, sad, full of joy or crying in regret. You may be relaxed, nervous, living an ordinary or unordinary life. Everybody lives this moment of life on this planet, Earth, continuously going around the sun.
— Asagi Maeda
With miniature figures set inside silver or gold geometric designs, Japanese jewelry artist Asagi Maeda creates one-of-a-kind jewelry pieces which tell a story. Working in precious metal and embellished with pearls and gemstones that she polishes herself, Maeda creates mini-sculptures reflecting a slice of life that double as wearable art.
More than 40 of Maeda’s creations are on view at the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens. The exhibit, Stories on the Planet, opened Nov. 4 and runs through April 7 in conjunction with the Mobilia Gallery in Cambridge, Mass. In addition, the museum store will feature wearable jewelry, starting at $60, by Maeda and works by Akiko Maeda, the artist’s mother, mentor and artist.
“It’s been a long-time dream to have a solo exhibition at a museum,” Maeda writes. “So, I am really happy and thankful from the bottom of my heart to Mobilia Gallery and The Morikami Museum.”
Stories on the Planet, her signature design, is a wearable piece of art portraying 32 cities in 28 countries, constructed with eight removable brooches combined into one necklace. Fashioned from wood, plexiglas, resin, enamel, silver, gold, and semi-precious or precious stones; she engraves and paints her works conveying narratives about daily life, family and society.
Born into a family that worked in the pearl industry, her grandfather made cultured pearls and her mother, also an artist, strung the pearls and crafted them into jewelry for sale.
At Tokyo Zokei University, Maeda studied sculpture and worked with marble and granite. After she graduated in 2000, she traveled to New York to study gemology at the Gemological Institute of America and enrolled at FIT where she honed her jewelry-making skills and acquired most of the techniques she uses today.
“Maeda has a unique, artistic voice,” says Carla Stansifer, Morikami’s curator of Japanese art. “She’s adept at weaving a narrative into her work and drawing out everyday moments and making them seem precious.”
“She’s very skilled as a jeweler and as an artist/sculptor,” she says. “She has a clear artistic voice and uses her imagination to create original pieces which call on the viewer’s imagination as well.”
One of Stansifer’s favorite Maeda creations is a sterling silver, 18-karat gold-and-turquoise ring titled, Poolside Ring, which depicts stick figures poised to dive into the turquoise pool.
Maeda came to her love of storytelling as a young girl.
“I loved writing stories since I was a child,” she writes on her Instagram page. “During elementary school, I drew picture books. In university, while creating sculptures, I exhibited poetry alongside them. So, the idea of incorporating stories into jewelry naturally emerged within me. Stories are an integral and inseparable part of my work and creative process.”
One of her favorite pieces and one that has had a profound effect on her, is one she calls, “Many Thanks Much Love,” created after her father’s death two years ago.
During her grieving, she reflected on childhood memories with her father — the time he bought her a balloon at a festival, an old photo of them exercising together, a visit to the planetarium and memories of his guitar playing at her wedding — and depicted these memories into miniature scenarios displayed in open-woven metal flowers, which she connected into a necklace-like lei.
“I cried as I created each memory, but through the process, I began to heal and was able to focus more on the (good) time in my father’s life rather than on his painful final days,” she says in an email from Japan. “This work is special to me as it encapsulates the experience of transforming sadness into love and gratitude.”
Living in Tokyo, Maeda is fascinated by urban life, the hustle and bustle of the city, the lives of the commuting Japanese salarymen and the fleetingness of it all. She recalls a large earthquake in Japan on March 11, 2011, that taught her that the daily life we take for granted is actually extremely fragile and can easily fall apart.
She’s grateful for each day, having a bed to sleep in, food on the table and friends and family with whom to laugh. “I hope that the simple things in life help us realize that we all have something in common and that the world will become more peaceful,” she says.
She’s fascinated by creating imaginary worlds within her jewelry — from the residents in an apartment buildings or crowded subway, to the bottom of the ocean, or images from a daydream, Maeda peeks into the inner world of anonymous people and brings them to life.
In Day of a Train, a large-scale necklace made with sterling silver, 18K yellow gold, acrylic and glass, Maeda depicts not only each subway car on the Shinkansen, the Japanese bullet train traveling from Osaka to Kyoto and then on to Tokyo, but slices of life unfolding inside each one — vignettes of rush hour, mother and child, lovers, groups of school kids, etc.
Inspired in part by Japanese jewelry artist Mariko Kusumoto, known for textile and metal art, Maeda says Kusumoto gave her the confidence to pursue her own style of jewelry.
“I decided to overwhelm people with energy rather than adhering to conventional notions of beauty,” Maeda says.
She also finds inspiration when she discovers the right stage for her work. Once she chooses a stage — be it a train, a movie theater, or a tree-lined avenue — what remains, she says, is to contemplate the kind of story to unfold upon that stage.
For the exhibit, Maeda created five videos detailing the story of how each piece came to be.
She also custom designs what she calls “non-fiction jewelry” (based on real people’s real life-stories) using a client’s personal narrative. For one client, the narrative was about folding laundry.
She created a pendant depicting family member’s clothing items, using amazonite to represent soap bubbles. She framed the pendant in a custom case, taking a moment in time and locking it forever inside the piece of fine jewelry.
For another client who lost her mother and sister, Maeda created a prayer objet d’art with memories of the client’s family. She incorporated the mother’s wedding band and pearl necklaces and vignettes from their family time together — playing music, traveling and drinking wine.
Most satisfying for Maeda is the reactions she receives from clients and others when they view her work.
“It’s rewarding when people express empathy toward my work,” she says. “It’s in those moments that I sense a genuine heart-to-heart and feel happiest.”
“My goal is to create true jewelry that can penetrate and brighten the eyes of those who see it,” Maeda says on her website. “I would like to deliver my heart to your heart.”
“It would be great if every day had a little sparkling,” she says. “I create my jewelry with this in mind.”
Stories on the Planet runs through April 7 at the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens, 4000 Morikami Park Road in Delray Beach. Hours are Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tickets: $16; $14 seniors; $12 for students with ID. Call 561-495-0233 or visti morikami.org for more information.