Otsuki Yosuke’s Art of Glass: Layering Colors, Engraving Memories

Faint colors layered inside glass shimmer when they catch the light. Within those colors dwell the artist’s memories, the vast amount of time devoted to creation, and techniques that cannot be imitated.

“I want to create colors that will remain 100 or 1,000 years into the future,” says Otsuki Yosuke, one of the most closely watched artists in Japanese glass crafts. This is the story of how an artist fascinated by glass has arrived at his one-of-a-kind works.

For glass artist Otsuki Yosuke, craftsmanship was just part of everyday life in the home where he was born and raised. His mother graduated from Tama Art University, one of Japan’s top art schools, and is among Japan’s leading metalwork artists. His father, also a graduate of Tama Art University, worked at an advertising agency before taking on painting and copperplate printmaking.

Says Otsuki, “I was the kind of kid who would draw pictures for hours if you gave me crayons and drawing paper.”

Otsuki decided that after high school, he would pursue an education at an art university.

“I wasn’t good at schoolwork, and neither was I particularly great at sports. Since both my parents were art school graduates, it was a natural progression to go down the road of art. However, at the time, art university entrance exams were divided by major, and changing majors after enrollment was difficult. I worried about what I should major in for some time.”

It was then that Otsuki saw footage of glass crafts on television, and something resonated within.

“I had worked with wood and paper, clay and metal before. But I had never previously been conscious of glass as an art medium. I had always simply been taught, ‘It’s dangerous, don’t touch it,’ and if it broke, I would wrap it in newspaper and throw it away immediately. I had assumed that’s just what glass was. The moment I learned that glass could be a sculpting material, I thought, ‘I want to try that.’”

The material’s characteristics also fascinated Otsuki—particularly the inside of transparent glass. “Even though it’s right there and visible, humans can’t touch it…It’s mysterious and interesting in a way that’s different from other materials. Glass felt to me like a beautiful medium unlike any other.”

Thus, Otsuki came to major in glass works at Tama Art University.

After university, Otsuki devoted himself to training as a glass artist at the Niijima Glass Art Center. Niijima is among the remote islands in the waters south of Tokyo. Otsuki’s days on this nature-rich island were full of surprises.

“The couple who owned the art center went to America after studying glass craft in Japan. There, they experienced the Studio Glass art movement firsthand. At least once a year, they invited leading artists from America and Italy to come and hold workshops. Working there as a staff member brought me into contact with the trends of the world’s most advanced craftsmanship.”

Afterward, he returned to his hometown and established a studio in Yokohama. As he continued searching for his own mode of expression, he began to consider exhibiting with the Japan Traditional Kōgei Exhibition as one of the platforms for presenting his work. Influenced by his mother, he had been exposed from an early age to a wide range of crafts beyond glass. This led him to reconsider how glass works could assert their own presence within the broader context of Japanese craft traditions.

He was deeply inspired by the meticulous works of lacquer and metal artisans, though there were times when he felt, “No matter how much effort I put in, I will never catch up to these people.” Yet a remark from another artist, “It’s wonderful that you can both blow and cut glass yourself,” led to a complete shift in his perspective.

“Blowing, casting, cutting, polishing. I can’t compete with specialists in each individual technique. But the other side of that is, I realized my strength was in the wide range of techniques I had learned at university and the art center. In judo terms, it’s called awase-waza ippon: winning by using a combination of techniques. Rather than a clean one-arm shoulder throw, it’s like winning with a technique combo. I thought that might become my originality.”

Otsuki began his pursuit of his own technique combination, and eventually arrived at multi-layered glass, born from combining multiple techniques such as blowing, carving, and polishing. Unlike blown glass, where shapes are limited to “solids of revolution”—forms that can be made via rotation around an axis—multi-layered glass allows for squares, pentagons, and other multilateral forms.

Purple and blue, green and red. A vast amount of time and skill is poured into creating Otsuki’s multi-layered glass works, where transparent colors are layered many times over.

Glass chunks are melted to create a wide variety of glass plates. These glass plates are then polished one by one before they are fused in an electric furnace. Glass-blowing techniques are used to create hollow internal cavities. Only after the base of the multi-layered glass piece born from these processes is sufficiently polished is the work finally complete.

Otsuki handles all these processes alone, and says a piece can take as long as two years from the initial concept to the final polishing to complete.

“The goal isn’t to put in effort for effort's sake. It’s just that if putting in effort makes the work better, then I don’t want to compromise on it. Even if it’s inefficient, I want to create something that could never be made through mass production. I believe that is my role as a glass craft artist.”

All of Otsuki’s multi-layered glass works are given the subtitle “Memories of Colors.” This is because Otsuki’s own memories are enfolded within his works.


For example, one of his representative pieces is Tofuhyo, or Light Buoy. The vase, colored with a shimmering gradation that shifts from indigo to purple, holds the memory of Otsuki’s journey setting out as an artist.

“It was the day I would return to my hometown after finishing five years of training in Niijima. When we departed, the ocean was rough with a storm, but as we approached the port of Yokohama, the waves gradually became calm. When I stepped out onto the deck, I saw, floating between a sky dyed the colors of the sunset and the sea, the flicker of a light buoy. At the sight, I truly felt, ‘My life as an artist is beginning now.’”

The artist’s personal memories and the universal workings of nature—precisely because of the connection between the two, the beauty of Light Buoy feels like that of a piece of a story.

Glass is a material that takes a long time—one to two million years—to decompose naturally. That, especially, is why Otsuki is conscious of “transcending time.”

“Something painted on a surface will ultimately disappear with time. However, with glass fused into layers, unless the piece has been dropped and broken, the colors will essentially never disappear. In 100 or 1,000 years, even if my name is forgotten, the colors of the glass will continue to exist unchanged. That is exactly why I want to create works that will resonate even in the hearts of people in the future.”

Otsuki Yosuke, fascinated by the mysterious beauty of glass, arrived at his unique multi-layered glass technique through technique combinations. Supporting his creation is a philosophy inherited from a leading Japanese metalwork artist: his mother.

“For us makers, the work is everything. Once it leaves our hands, it cannot be corrected, and we cannot make any excuses. That is why I want to do my absolute best while the ‘now’ is in my hands. My mother and I make completely different works. However, the philosophy of a maker that I learned from my mother lives on within me.

“I believe I am the only one in the world making works like this. Being one-of-a-kind is my pride,” says Otsuki. Today, as ever, he gets down to work in his small glass studio, as he hopes that Memories of Colors will transcend time and move the hearts of people in the future.