Blum is pleased to present Surface and signal, a group exhibition of work by Kazunori Hamana, Akane Saijo, Peter Shear, and Yuji Ueda.

Surface and signal brings together four artists whose practices engage with formal clarity, material honesty, and sensitivity to the boundaries between intention and chance. The exhibition foregrounds how each artist operates within the inherent structure of their chosen medium—painting and ceramics, respectively—while maintaining a looseness that allows for vulnerability, gesture, and quiet radicalism.

Reiterating the poetic tendencies of his practice, Shear’s paintings in Surface and Signal are pithy bursts of evocative gestures rooted in wide-reaching, visual reference to moments in culture and art history. With brushstrokes that both emphasize the artist’s hand and physical qualities of his paint, the expressive gestures in Shear’s works, such as Current (2025), call out to the materiality and intricate glazing of ceramics by Kazunori Hamana, Akane Saijo, and Yuji Ueda.

Hamana’s vessels, hand-built by coiling extruded strands of ash gray clay, carry the imprint of the artist’s palms and fingers throughout their physicality and brushed glazing. Robust and sizable, these rotund basins team with the minute details imparted upon them by human entropy and the circumstances of their making. Similarly examining the sublime implications of cultivated chance, Ueda aligns himself with the Shigaraki ceramic tradition of beautiful imperfections. Using a layer of plaster atop clay, the shells of Ueda’s vessels are built to crack and peel away revealing oozing, vivid glaze and cast forms that have been used in Japan since the Edo period.

Saijo creates ceramic forms that correspond to and create space for the human body. Often staging activations wherein performers breathe into or interface with her work, she calls attention to the unknowable and disjointed space of communication and perception that divides us all. Skillfully glazing her impeccably built forms, Saijo, like the other artists in Surface and signal, plays with the evocative tension of achieving modes of perfection in our inherently disordered human experience.