Design & digital art · Guide

Only in Tokyo: Lucie Rie's colours inside a 1930s Art Deco palace

By FUMI · Tokyo · updated August 2026

2026 has been a genuinely rich year for exhibitions in Tokyo, and this is the one I'd send a design friend to first. Lucie Rie's vessels — those bronze-lipped, impossibly coloured bowls — are shown inside the former Asaka residence, a 1933 Art Deco palace with its classical Showa-era interiors intact. The works have travelled elsewhere in Japan; what you can only see here is the contrast — her quiet, modern colour set against that beautiful old design. It closes September 13, so this is a "go soon."

Who Lucie Rie was — and why designers keep coming back to her

Lucie Rie (1902–1995) was born in Vienna and trained there at the Kunstgewerbeschule, the city's school of applied arts, in the tail end of its great modernist moment. In 1938 she fled the war and settled in London, where she spent the rest of her life at the wheel. What she made looks effortless and is anything but: thin, upright forms thrown with unusual precision, fine sgraffito lines scratched through the surface, inlaid colour, and glazes she mixed to do strange, beautiful things — bronze that looks almost metallic, volcanic pitted whites, a pink that shouldn't work and does.

If you've spent any time around product or graphic design, her pots read like a masterclass in restraint: every line is doing a job, nothing is decoration for its own sake. That's why she's a designer's artist as much as a potter's.

Why this particular show matters

Two reasons. First, scale and rarity — this is the first proper Rie retrospective in Japan in roughly ten years, pulling together works held here including the well-known Iuchi Collection (deposited at the National Crafts Museum). Seeing that many of her pieces in one room is not something Tokyo offers often.

Second, context. The show doesn't isolate her. It sets her alongside people she actually knew — the Viennese architect-designer Josef Hoffmann, and in Britain the potters Bernard Leach, Hans Coper and Shoji Hamada — and uses those relationships to re-examine how her work talks to East Asian, and specifically Japanese, ceramics. For a foreign visitor that framing is a gift: it quietly explains why a Viennese émigré's pots feel so at home in Tokyo.

The building is half the reason to go

The Teien Art Museum isn't a neutral white box. It's the former Asaka residence, an Art Deco house completed in 1933, with original interiors — glass, metalwork, lacquer, lighting — commissioned from French and Japanese designers of the period. Rie's spare, modern forms in these rooms make for one of those rare shows where the container and the contents are in genuine conversation. Give yourself time for the house itself, and for the garden it's named after.

The practical details

One small thing that trips people up: the timed-entry system means the ticket is for an arrival window, not a queue you can join whenever. If you're building a day around it, lock the slot first and plan the rest around that.

Common questions