Kelly Akashi: Heirloom

For her first exhibition with Lisson Gallery in New York, Kelly Akashi builds on her pivotal 2025 presentation in Los Angeles. If that earlier exhibition addressed inheritance through formal and material tension, Heirloom turns more directly toward loss: how it is carried, and how it is given form.

Throughout the exhibition, objects passed down through family history are reembodied in materials that register their disappearance. A lace tablecloth becomes weathering steel; an inherited ring is enlarged beyond wear, its weight exceeding the body that once carried it; delicate doilies return as suspended ash impressions. Plants from the artist’s garden are translated into glass and cast bronze forms, shaped by the gestures of her hands. Weathering steel, ash, and rough stone do not conceal rupture; they hold it in plain view.

In these works, what was once intimate expands into space, suspended between growth and decay. Coinciding with Akashi’s participation in the 2026 Whitney Biennial and her commission for JFK Terminal 1, the exhibition reflects on heirlooms not as tokens of nostalgia, but as material conditions in which matter itself carries history forward.