Born in Shiga Prefecture in 1998 and currently based in Kyoto, Rio Hashimoto is a Japanese urushi lacquer artist working across sculpture, video installation, and kintsugi. She graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Department of Crafts, at Kyoto City University of Arts, specializing in urushi lacquering, and completed her master’s degree in the same field at the university’s Graduate School of Fine Arts in 2025.
Founded in 1880 as Japan’s oldest public art university, Kyoto City University of Arts offers rigorous training that brings traditional urushi techniques into dialogue with the history, material science, and contemporary possibilities of the medium. This education informs Hashimoto’s exploration of urushi as both a field of craftsmanship and a material for contemporary artistic expression.
Her practice ranges from urushi sculpture to video installation and centers on the tension between “order”—the aesthetic standards cultivated within Japanese lacquer craft—and the elements that fall outside or disrupt it. Alongside her kintsugi practice, she creates original works of contemporary urushi art, which she presents in solo and group exhibitions.
Urushi itself gives material form to this duality. It can be refined into a flawless, mirror-like surface, yet in its raw state, contact with the skin can cause inflammation. Hashimoto brings such opposing qualities—beauty and discomfort, attraction and taboo—into a single work. Rather than resolving these contradictions, she uses them to examine the boundaries between empathy and rejection in human perception.
At the center of Hashimoto’s approach is an emphasis on the creative process rather than the finished object alone. The accumulation of actions, decisions, and material changes remains integral to the meaning of each work. Irregularities are not treated simply as imperfections to be removed, but as elements through which a work may be transformed and understood anew.
Within this broader practice, kintsugi offers another way of considering material change. Using traditional methods to restore broken ceramics, Hashimoto allows cracks and traces of damage to remain present within the renewed form. The restored object retains the history of its fracture while acquiring a different visual and material identity.
Across sculpture, moving image, and kintsugi, Hashimoto continues to investigate how urushi can both embody and unsettle established ideas of beauty. Her work expands the material beyond conventional distinctions between craft, restoration, and contemporary art, opening a space in which attraction and resistance may coexist.
