Seimei Kaikan
Current Exhibition
June 9 – December 5, 2026 · Early Term
“With Prayer”
The hall is temporarily closed June 14–16, 2026.
Since ancient times and across all places, people have offered prayer in many forms. Though its object differs by region, culture, and faith, the act of turning the heart outward — wishing strongly, with words and images, for the peace of daily life or in thought of someone dear — may be called universal. As cave paintings, ruins, and haniwa figures attest, art and craft, song and dance have accompanied such acts since the dawn of human history, and their very forms are prayer itself.
In regions where Buddhism spread, paintings and statues depicting the Buddha’s figure and stories were placed at the center of ritual, and modern artists too expressed motifs in that tradition with fresh sensibilities. Not only paintings of sacred peaks and famous places, but even landscapes and bird-and-flower paintings of seemingly familiar scenes reveal a gratitude toward the nature that sustains us. Each of the many handcraft processes behind a work of craft involves a dialogue with natural materials, and the path to completion overlaps somewhere with the figure of prayer. This exhibition introduces works through which visitors can, in a sense, relive that act of “prayer.”
The exhibition also presents the work of Tetsurō Sugimoto, who embraced the idea of bankyō-kiitsu — that all the world’s faiths and thoughts issue from the Himalayas — and held human happiness and world peace as his ideal. Devoting himself to the study of Japanese painting, Sugimoto worked for twelve years, from 1969 to 1981 (from age 70 to 82), on his culminating series as a religious painter, the “World Ten Great Religions murals.” Placing the Himalayan peaks at the center as “the seat of the gods,” he produced 25 large works — two or three each for Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Manichaeism, Islam, Taoism, and Ancient Shinto. Each was painted after visiting the sites in person and grounding the work in the doctrine, history, discourse, and customs he saw and felt with his own eyes.
By spending time face to face with these prayerful paintings and craft works, we hope visitors may look anew at the movements of their own hearts while turning their thoughts to the wide and distant world.
Commentary by Aiko Matsuda