Northing Space
Program
General
Artists
Northing Space (Bergen)
Northing Space is the exhibition venue of Northing—Centre for East Asian Art and Culture in Bergen, Norway.
In Norway, Northing seeks to enrich the diversity of cultural life by opening a sustained window onto contemporary art and culture from East Asia. Through a cross-disciplinary programme encompassing exhibitions, publications, and public events, Northing engages Norwegian audiences with artistic practices and cultural perspectives that are otherwise rarely encountered locally.
Internationally, Northing creates platforms for direct dialogue and collaboration between Norwegian artists and their counterparts in East Asia, encouraging reciprocal exchange and long-term professional relationships.
Proposal
“Holding on to the weak is called strength.”— Tao Te Ching, Chapter 52
In ancient Chinese philosophy, hard and soft, strength and weakness, are not fixed opposites locked in perpetual conflict. Rather, they are complementary aspects of a larger whole, constantly transforming into one another.
Ceramic and textile are two materials widely explored in contemporary art and craft. Through their physical properties, they are often associated with the hard and the soft respectively. Yet artists working with these materials frequently seek to move beyond such conventional distinctions, exploring qualities and sensations that challenge our expectations.
For this exhibition at the community-oriented art fair SWAB Barcelona, Northing has brought together a group of Norwegian artists whose practices engage with one or both of these materials. Through sculpture, installation, and material experimentation, the artists either subvert the inherent properties traditionally associated with ceramic and textile or bring them into dialogue, creating new forms of balance and harmony.
Born in Brazil, shaped by Japanese heritage, and ultimately rooted in Norway, Kiyoshi Yamamoto’s practice is a flamboyant rebuttal to the label of “exoticism”. Refusing to be categorised as a compliant cultural specimen, he instead deploys intensely saturated dyes and the tension of textiles to weave a form of political rhetoric with palpable weight. The vibrant fabrics capture the heat of social conflicts, transforming complex negotiations of identity into powerful sensory encounters that compel viewers to confront the cultural wounds and struggles for power concealed beneath their dazzling surfaces.
Yamamoto has held numerous solo exhibitions, including at Buskerud Art Center, Heimdal Kunstforening, Norske Grafikere, and Soft Gallery. His works are held in several major collections, including Nordenfjeldske Museum of Decorative Arts in Trondheim, KODE Art Museums of Bergen, and the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Brazil.
Kari Aasen is a Norwegian ceramicist and visual artist based in Bergen. She was educated at the Bergen School of Arts and Crafts and holds a postgraduate degree in specialised art from the Bergen Academy of Art and Design. Over several decades, Aasen has developed an extensive artistic practice spanning ceramics, sculpture, and installation, and is regarded as a significant voice within Norwegian contemporary art and craft.
Her works are material-based and process-oriented, often developed through repetitive, layered actions in which clay is shaped, built up, and fired over time. She works primarily with stoneware and porcelain, exploring the relationship between hand, material, and time. The sculptural objects retain traces of their making in the surface—cracks, layers, and textures—emerging as organic forms that oscillate between the raw and the refined.
A central project in her practice is the Still Life series, in which organic material is transformed into porcelain objects—like frozen moments or fossils—investigating the transition from nature to culture, from life to permanence. Her work frequently engages with themes of time, transience, and memory, balancing the sensorial with the conceptual.
Aasen has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, in solo exhibitions and group projects, and her works are held in collections including the National Museum of Norway, KODE Art Museums, the Nordenfjeldske Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, and several international collections. She has received numerous grants and honours, including the Norwegian Association for Arts and Crafts’ Honour Award.
Through a long and sustained artistic career, Aasen has contributed to the development of ceramics as an independent artistic medium, where craft, concept, and materiality converge in an exploration of the transformations of time and form.
The ceramics of Lydia Soojin Park record the sedimentation of time and emotion. Works such as When the Sky Breathes, The Water Listens emerge from experimental firings at both high and low temperatures; each firing produces unpredictable reactions, allowing the artist to explore and blur the boundary between painting and ceramic glaze. Cobalt-blue pigments drift across porcelain surfaces like the faint light where the Norwegian sky meets the sea.
In Temporal Expansion, the artist recombines discarded porcelain shards with factory clay, refiring them into a sculptural form resembling an archive of time itself. Meanwhile, the ambiguous vessel-like shapes in Small Painting hint at the relativity of perception—what we see is not necessarily what we receive. Each work becomes a specimen of contemplation, where air, water, and light condense into a cultural landscape that lingers in memory.
Park’s works are held in major collections including the National Museum of Norway, KODE Art Museums of Bergen, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the City of Oslo, and Nordenfjeldske Museum of Decorative Arts in Trondheim. In 2014 she received the Talente Prize – Meister der Zukunft in Munich.
Daniela Bergschneider is adept at unsettling material perception, creating works that evoke a powerful sense of the uncanny. By stitching together cold, sharp porcelain fragments with soft, wrinkled textiles, she constructs ambiguous forms that seem to hover between organism and object, between imitation of nature and artificial experiment.
These works possess tactile qualities reminiscent of skin, organs, or deep-sea creatures, stirring a sensation that feels strangely familiar yet impossible to name. Bergschneider deliberately dissolves the boundary between “beauty” and “repulsion”, allowing the two to coexist in unstable equilibrium. When viewers are drawn closer by the works’ intricate construction, yet instinctively recoil from their fleshy, invasive organic forms, this moment of contradiction becomes precisely the tactile reflection the artist intends: our cognitive boundaries loosen, and within the fissure between illusion and reality lies the possibility of redefining what we consider real.
Bergschneider’s works are held in major collections including the National Museum of Norway, KODE Art Museums of Bergen, Nordenfjeldske Museum of Decorative Arts in Trondheim Equinor Art Programme, Textile and Clothing Association of Portugal, City of Gothenburg, Guldagergaard Ceramic Research Center in Denmark.
