The Japanese term mono no aware refers to a particular awareness of impermanence — a sensitivity to the transitory nature of all things, and the subtle melancholy that arises from their passing. It is this concept that Kenro Izu embraces in his new exhibition at Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, on view until November 22, 2025. The show coincides with the release of Mono no Aware, a two-volume publication by Nazraeli Press, and marks the culmination of five decades of Izu’s photographic practice dedicated to exploring the sacred and the ephemeral.
For this project, Izu turned his large-format camera toward three intimately linked subjects: centuries-old Japanese Noh masks, the ancient stones and trees that surround forgotten shrines, and the wildflowers and grasses that bloom briefly near his home. In each of these series, the artist invites viewers to confront time’s relentless passage and to contemplate beauty not as something fixed, but as something revealed through change.
“Art and life are intertwined for me, and my thoughts have often turned to the notion of beauty as understood in both Western and Japanese contexts,” Izu explains. “Encounters with Noh masks sparked a deep curiosity in their human expressions. The gaze of the masks seemed to penetrate one’s inner being, reminding me that to observe is also to be observed.” These masks, carved in the 14th century, carry expressions that shift with the viewer’s gaze — at once solemn and tender, fierce and sorrowful — embodying the emotional depth of the theatrical tradition from which they originate.
From there, Izu’s lens moves outward, into the landscapes where Noh itself was born. In the dense forests surrounding Shinto shrines, he photographed stones draped with sacred rope and towering trees wrapped in ceremonial bands. “I was drawn particularly to shrine forests, where sacred trees, rocks, and dense spiritual groves evoke a sense of timelessness,” he recalls. These images, rich in texture and atmosphere, are less about the objects themselves than about the invisible forces they hold — the centuries of ritual, memory, and reverence embedded in their presence.
During the global pandemic, when travel was impossible, Izu’s practice turned inward once more. At home, he began arranging seasonal flowers and grasses in hand-thrown clay vases, photographing them in their brief bloom and inevitable decay. “The fleeting beauty of their unnoticed bloom and decay resonated deeply with me,” he says. These still lifes, rendered in delicate platinum-palladium and gelatin silver prints, reveal the quiet poetry of everyday life — a fallen petal, a fading leaf — and remind us that impermanence is not to be feared, but cherished.
Each print is a unique object in itself. Mounted on antique silverleaf salvaged from folding screens and bordered with fragments of vintage kimono fabric, the works are both photographs and crafted artifacts — physical manifestations of the historical continuum they depict.
Born in Osaka in 1949 and based in New York since the early 1970s, Kenro Izu has spent much of his career photographing sacred spaces around the world. In the late 1970s, he went to Egypt and photographed the temples of Luxor and Karnak using a large-format 14×20-inch camera — that redefined his artistic path. This encounter with ancient ruins, where history seemed to breathe through stone, marked the beginning of a lifelong quest to capture places imbued with spiritual resonance. Over the following decades, Izu traveled extensively across Asia and Europe, producing acclaimed series on sacred sites in Bhutan, Cambodia, India, and Italy. Each project reflects the same contemplative approach: slow, deliberate image-making, rooted in patience and respect for the subject.
His commitment to humanity extends beyond his art. In 1995, Izu founded Friends Without a Border, a nonprofit that has built and supported hospitals providing free medical care to children in Cambodia and Laos. This philanthropic dimension mirrors the ethos of his photography — a belief in the enduring connections between people, cultures, and histories.
Today, with Mono no Aware, Izu distills 50 years of looking into a meditation on what it means to see — and to let go. His images do not attempt to arrest time. Instead, they honor its passing, revealing beauty in the moment just before it disappears.
“Mono no Aware”, by Kenro Izu is on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York until November 22, 2025. The eponymous book is available from Nazraeli Press for $85.
