Frozen in time: how Japanese artist Rui Sasaki turned a historic bathhouse into an immersive art space

Seto’s identity as Japan’s renowned “ceramic city” also shaped the project. The region’s clay-rich soil has sustained its pottery culture for over a millennium, linking the community to its landscape in material and spiritual ways. Yet Sasaki finds that many locals had grown estranged from this natural origin. “Everyone forgets clay originally came from nature,” she says, a sentiment that became central to her installation. Unforgettable Residues seeks to make visible these invisible threads between nature, human craft and time—what she calls “the layers of hidden memories behind ceramic culture”.

In transforming the bathhouse into an art space, Sasaki repurposed window glass salvaged from abandoned homes and factories across Seto. Each sheet bears its own patina of use: dust, fingerprints, rain streaks, stickers and bird droppings—marks of daily life left suspended on the material. These traces, trapped between transparency and surface, have become witnesses to the city’s history. When fired in a kiln, the accumulated dust turns a surprising pinkish-red, producing what Sasaki describes as “the beautiful residue of time”.

Through these glass fragments, she experiences a kind of temporal displacement. “The time of window glass made is various,” she says, “and I feel that I am time-travelling through the glass.” The installation thus becomes both archaeological and poetic, inviting viewers to peer not only through but into the material, to sense the layers of existence it carries.

Read more: Wong Kar-wai meets art and heritage at Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai’s historic mansion

Alongside glass, Sasaki integrated plants collected from around Seto, foregrounding the city’s overlooked ecological richness. Many species, she finds out, survived thanks to the peculiar relationship between humans and the ceramics industry. Wetlands once threatened by urban development remained intact because they supplied clay, while mountains denuded by clay extraction were later replanted to heal the land. Around temples and shrines, where clay-digging was forbidden, ancient flora still thrived.

The process of gathering these plants became a form of shared storytelling. One local resident guided Sasaki to the site of her long-demolished school, recounting childhood memories as they picked plants together. Such encounters transformed Unforgettable Residues into a collaborative act of remembrance, in which personal and environmental histories intertwine. The plants are not decorative but mnemonic, embodying continuity amid disappearance.

Sasaki’s artistic language is one of subtle contrasts—between the visible and the concealed, the natural and the constructed, fragility and endurance. In the bathing space, light filters through the repurposed glass panes, refracting off the surfaces of water and plant matter. The viewer’s reflection mingles with the lingering marks of others, merging past and present in a quiet choreography of transparency. This interplay captures what the artist sees as the essence of glass: its ability to record yet distort, to reveal yet withhold.

In that sense, Unforgettable Residues has extended her ongoing exploration of glass as a custodian of memory. Just as glass preserves fingerprints and breath, so too does it preserve emotion and time. The bathhouse has become a vessel of collective remembrance, where residues—of touch, of clay, of dust—formed a new kind of landscape, one not of ceramics or architecture but of traces and reflections.

NOW READ

Rockbund’s youngest director X Zhu-Nowell on meeting Ai Weiwei, Hong Kong’s art ecosystem and a new generation of museum experience

Lea Salonga, Disney’s original Jasmine and Mulan, is set to sing at Hong Kong Disneyland next year

Inside the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza: Tutankhamun’s gold mask, Ramses II’s statue and many more ancient treasures