Kento Saisho anchors Cheremoya’s booth with two steel sculptures sited on a low plinth. Connoting bells, crucibles, and post-Minimalist anti-form, Saisho’s welded configurations agglutinating bearings, flanged protrusions, and torqued armatures—extend the procedural logics of Eva Hesse while resonating with the ontological inquiries of Nobuo Sekine and Lee Ufan. His position within a Chinese-Japanese American diasporic formation subtly recalibrates these references: the works’ hybrid materiality and ritual inflections echo lineages of craft, metallurgy, and devotional objecthood that traverse East Asian and American industrial histories alike. The resulting forms suggest a Kavanian architecture of suspended ritual, recalling Matta-Clark’s incised voids as well as scorched dark age reliquaries.

Kento Saisho (b. 1993 in Salinas, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles. The artist earned his BFA in Furniture Design from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, in 2016, where he was a Windgate-Lamar Fellowship recipient from the Center for Craft in Asheville, NC. Solo & two-person exhibitions: “Conversion,” Cheremoya, Los Angeles (2025); “Things,” Open Mind Art Space, Los Angeles (2022); “Mansion Apartment Shack House,” Gallery North, Penland, NC (2020). Selected group exhibitions: “NADA Miami 2025,” with Cheremoya, Miami (2025); “limina, lumina,”
Reisig and Taylor Contemporary, Los Angeles (2024); “Best in Show,” Pamplemousse Gallery, Richmond, VA (2024); “Smokey Trails,” Rhett Baruch Gallery, Los Angeles; “Skin, Holes, and Hovels,” Reisig and Taylor Contemporary, Los Angeles (2023); “Fjord Anniversary Show,” Fjord Gallery, Philadelphia (2023); “WITNESS | holding time,” Penland Gallery, Penland, NC (2023); “Queer + Metals,” Hereford College, Hereford, UK (2022); “A Tender Presence” (traveling) Gallery 2052, Chicago, Alma’s, Richmond, VA, and Penland Gallery, Penland, NC (2022); Small Acts: The Craft of Subversion, San Diego, CA; “NOMAD Art Show,” Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA (2021); “Dutch Invertuals: True Matter,” Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven, NL (2021); “What We Inhabit If Not Our Bodies,” Finlandia University, Hancock, MI (2021); and “Softer than Thought,” Penland School of Craft, Penland, NC (2019). Saisho completed the Core Fellowship at the Penland School of Craft from 2018-2020.