Yan ZORITCHAK
Yan ZORITCHAK (France)
Glass Artist
The International Exhibition of Glass Kanazawa began in 1984, and 2019 will mark the fourteenth time the event has been held. It is a famous and renowned international event, organized in a remarkable city where numerous traces of culture from past centuries can be found. According to Mr. Masanori Tanimoto, Governor of Ishikawa Prefecture, the new National Museum of Kogei will help accentuate the influence of the event.
Every time, around 400 participants from all the countries and regions of the world send their proposals for the Kanazawa competition. A first internal jury makes an initial selection of about sixty works from the applications. A second jury composed of artists, critics and key international figures from the arts world examines the works and makes the final selection.
The entries as a whole form a huge international flow from all the regions of the world. This manifold and diverse flow possesses indisputable power. It runs like a stream, becoming small then large rivers, reaching the oceans and through them the Universe. Its strength and vitality are indisputable.
Leafing through the International Exhibition of Glass catalogs, I was transported in a kind of flagship of creation in the glass domain. The visitors to Shiinoki Cultural Complex. and the Notojima Glass Art Museum have the chance and the good fortune to find themselves at the epicenter of this creation.
With the benefit of hindsight, I might make a suggestion for the years to come: perhaps the visitors could discover all the works submitted. It would also have been interesting, as an appendix to the catalog, to publish the names of the contestants, the countries and regions they are from, as well as the titles of their works. As part of the jury, I was quickly struck by the strength with which the future of Humankind on Earth was called to mind. Artists are citizens first and foremost, and, like other people, they each like to stage, in their own fashion and according to their own sensitivity, the concerns of present-day society.
This huge conglomeration of very diverse works, all of them carried in this flagship, give Hope for the future of the Earth and Humanity. It allows us to hope that all living species will be able to live together in harmony in a new Era of Peace and Prosperity (Reiwa).