Memories of West Africa: The Collection of Anthropologist Junzo Kawada and Ceramic Artist Machiko Ogawa

From July 11 to September 6, 2026, the Setagaya Art Museum in Tokyo presented Memories of West Africa: The Collection of Anthropologist Junzo Kawada and Ceramic Artist Machiko Ogawa.

In the 1970s, anthropologist Junzo Kawada conducted fieldwork in Burkina Faso, West Africa, accompanied by ceramic artist Machiko Ogawa. Drawing on passages from Kawada’s writings, including Sabanna no Hakubutsushi (A Natural History of the Savanna), the exhibition presented some 350 objects the two encountered and collected during their time there.

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When entering the galleries, there was a welcoming sense of serenity. Earth, wood, grasses, cloth, metal, hide. The earthy hues of the savanna were restful to the eye, while each object seemed to speak its own story in a quiet voice. Moving through the galleries, I felt less like an observer than someone taking in, through all the senses, the atmosphere of the land and the rhythms of everyday life.

Vessels for daily use, objects of personal adornment, things associated with prayer and ritual. Materials drawn from the natural world pass through human hands and take on forms that become part of everyday life. Looking at these objects, there was a sense of receiving nature’s gifts with care and allowing them to live on in another form. Earth, trees, grasses, animals—each offers something from which human hands can create. In the craftsmanship, I sensed a quiet gratitude for what the natural world provides.

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I was also moved by “Rain,” an essay by Kawada included in the exhibition catalogue.

Kawada evokes an evening sky over the savanna awaiting rain. Unlike the dry season, when the Harmattan blows from the Sahara, a sky heavy with moisture catches and magnifies the subtlest shifts in the setting sun. Scattered clouds continually change their colors and forms, creating what Kawada calls “a mythical landscape never before seen by human eyes” (Memories of West Africa exhibition catalogue, p. 15; translated from the Japanese).

Sky, rain, wind, light, earth, plants, animals, human beings. The handcrafted objects on display seemed to me to have emerged from this same vast continuum of the natural world.

At the heart of the exhibition, too, were two distinct ways of seeing. In “From the Maghreb to the Savanna: An Interview with Machiko Ogawa,” Miki Tsukada reflects on the particular nature of Ogawa’s artistic practice: an artist who would build her own kiln from the ground up and search for minerals from which to make her own glazes. Tsukada observes: “Had Ogawa not been that kind of artist, [...] Professor Kawada’s fieldwork might also have taken a different form” (Memories of West Africa exhibition catalogue, p. 232; translated from the Japanese). There was the anthropologist’s gaze, attentive to people, their lives and their societies; and the ceramic artist’s gaze, sensitive to materials, touch, and the process of making. The catalogue also features illustrations Ogawa created for Kawada’s books. They stood on the same land, yet each observed, experienced, and recorded Africa in a different way. Perhaps this collection came into being precisely at the point where those two ways of seeing converged.

Nature and humanity. Everyday life and handwork. As I moved through the galleries, I felt the quiet presence of something larger holding them all together—Mother Nature.