Editor’s Note
**Editor’s Note:** From July 15 to August 16, 2026, the Hermès Foundation brings its Skills Academy program to Tokyo’s SKAC, focusing on metal as a natural material. Running since 2021, this year’s open class invites participants to rediscover craftsmanship through the five senses, exploring metal’s overlooked role in daily life and human history.
The Hermès Foundation is hosting the Skills Academy program “Learning from Metal, Thinking with the Five Senses: Summer Open Class” from July 15 to August 16, 2026, at SKAC (SKWAT KAMEARI ART CENTRE) in Tokyo. The program, which began in 2021, explores the reconsideration, inheritance, and expansion of craftsmanship and hand skills related to natural materials, with a focus on metal for the 2025-2026 period.
Metal is an essential material in our daily lives, found in scissors, machines, and buildings, yet it is rarely perceived as a familiar natural material. Comprising about 80% of all elements on Earth, metal has accompanied human civilization from the Bronze Age to the present, possessing unique properties such as the diversity of raw minerals, processing techniques, and interpretive ambivalence.
The “Summer Open Class” is part of the experiential program “Learning from Metal, Thinking with the Five Senses,” held in spring and summer 2026. It begins with a report exhibition of the “Spring Workshop” for middle and high school students, followed by a group exhibition titled “Binding” featuring four artists who engage with metal experimentally. The aim is to create a learning platform for deeper exploration of metal, combining visual displays with hands-on workshops and talk events to discover metal’s diverse textures and rebuild our relationship with it.
The central exhibition “Binding” explores the chain-like connection between metal and the body through the practices of four artists who engage with metal experimentally, referencing the history of science and technology evolved through the study of metal’s microscopic structures and mechanisms.
Leonor Serrano Rivas invites audiences into a hybrid ecosystem where inorganic (metal) and organic (plants) combine. By applying electroforming to generate metal coatings in electrolytic solutions, she protects decaying plant bodies with a “second skin” of metal, crystallizing metal with plants as hosts. Metal refined from minerals condensed with past time slowly returns to the natural world as minerals, with accumulated time forming shapes beyond a single life.
Alongside Rivas’s hybrid plants, Playfool’s turtle-shaped robot, covered in a metal shell, moves autonomously in response to its environment, approaching visitors. When touching the turtle to communicate, we realize our daily interaction with invisible metal behaviors through electricity and electronics.
Heat causes electrons to separate from metal atoms, and as they return to stable orbits, they are perceived as metal-specific “colors” (light wavelengths)—the principle behind flame reactions used in fireworks. In Japan, where saltpeter (a key firework ingredient) was unavailable, it was historically produced by combining organic matter with potassium (metal) through soil microorganisms. Firework artist Shizuka Shimada questions the materiality behind fireworks, which have served as centripetal spectacles projecting wishes for protection, celebration, and mourning.
Jewelry artist Shin Okuyama takes a site-specific approach, using forms born from communication with materials through traditional techniques and handwork. He brings depth to the SKAC space, as if releasing the intimate anima of jewelry and the body into the space.
These diverse works, arising from microscopic electron behaviors, reveal metal as an open material where opposing elements can transform and interweave. The binding of metal and non-metal, artificial and natural, life and non-life, reminds us that seemingly opposing entities complement each other’s possibilities, creating new phenomena and environments as inseparable existences.
Over five days in spring 2026, with 10 groups of specialists, middle and high school students explored “metal skills” through making beyond human scale (bridges, towers), craftsman handwork (scissors, tools, watches), and artistic expressions (sculpture, dance, music). The results are reported through words, actual tools, and recorded videos.
Space Design: DAIKEI MILLS
Graphic Design: Natsuko Yoneyama
Pre-Workshop: Steel Scaffolding Architecture
Have you seen “scaffolding” used at construction sites? Usually removed after building completion, scaffolding becomes the main element at SKAC. Join DAIKEI MILLS to learn scaffolding mechanisms and build the workshop stage.
Instructor: DAIKEI MILLS
Dates: July 11 (Sat) 14:00-16:00 & July 12 (Sun) 14:00-16:00
Age: 10+ (possible tool use and heights)
Capacity: ~15 per session
Registration: Event ended.
Artist Talk 1: Leonor Serrano Rivas
Date: July 18 (Sat) 14:00-15:10
Age: 13+ (sequential Japanese-English interpretation)
Capacity: ~40 per session
Registration: From June 23 (Tue), first-come basis via website
Artist Talk 2: Playfool
Date: July 19 (Sun) 14:00-15:10
Age: 13+ (sequential Japanese-English interpretation)
Capacity: ~40 per session
Registration: From June 23 (Tue), first-come basis via website
Workshop: From Material to Jewelry
Do you know forging? A technique of hammering and stretching metal to create shapes. Experience how metal wires and sheets become chains, motifs, and wearable jewelry with jewelry designer Shin Okuyama.
Instructor: Shin Okuyama (Jewelry Designer)
Dates: July 25 (Sat) 13:00-16:00 & July 26 (Sun) 13:00-16:00
Age: 10+ (possible tool use)
Capacity: ~15 per session
Registration: From June 19 (Fri), lottery via website
Workshop: Metal Playground (No Registration Required, Free Entry)
Use metal tools like scissors and hammers, or materials like aluminum rods, for crafting. Try strange instruments, pick up small watch parts with tweezers, and experience with Hideki Sekine.
Instructor: Hideki Sekine (Wako University)
Dates: August 2 (Sun) 13:00-16:00 & August 9 (Sun) 13:00-16:00
Age: 10+ (possible tool and blade use)
Registration: Not required, free entry (may wait if crowded)
Workshop: Make Sparklers
Instructor: Shizuka Shimada
Dates: August 15 (Sat) 17:00-19:00 & August 16 (Sun) 17:00-19:00
Age: 10+ (possible tool and blade use)
Capacity: ~15 per session
Registration: From July 15 (Wed), lottery via website
Guide Tour & Other Events
Exhibition Guide Tour: No registration required, free entry. Feel metal closer through explanations.
Dates: Every Fri, Sat, Sun 16:30-17:00
Age: 10+
Registration: Not required
