Kōri no Tōrō

“It takes centuries for stone to become sand. This sculpture shows it in 24 hours”.

Japanese garden designer and artist Hiroshi Honda has created Kōri no Tōrō (Japanese stone lantern made of ice), a site-specific installation carved from a single 135 kg block of clear ice, to recreate a traditional Japanese stone lantern. With a flame lit inside, the sculpture melts and collapses over approximately 24 hours – compressing centuries of natural weathering into a single day.

Honda describes the aesthetic underpinning this work as Yūkan-bi (融環美), meaning “the beauty of cyclical dissolution” – an aesthetic that emerges through disappearance and return.

“What seems eternal vanishes. When I recognised this simple truth, I wanted to make the very process of disappearance visible”, says Honda.

The work was presented in November 2025 in the courtyard of Tsuchikawa Shoten, a 150-year-old merchant house in Ikeda, Gifu Prefecture, Japan.

Origin

The project originated from a commission to repair an aged stone lantern. When Honda examined the fire chamber, he discovered that the stone had deteriorated into sand. What had appeared permanent was quietly returning to the earth. This observation prompted a question: if all things eventually disappear, could the very process of disappearing become a sculptural experience?

Material and structure

The sculpture comprises six components: hōju (sacred jewel finial), kasa (roof), hibukuro (fire chamber), chūdai (middle platform), sao (shaft), and kiso (base). This structure resonates with the five elements of Buddhist cosmology (earth, water, fire, wind, and void).

The work measures 137.5 × 56 × 56 cm and weighs approximately 100 kg when assembled. The ice was carved from a high-clarity block made over 48 hours using a slow-freezing process that eliminates impurities.

Experience

In November 2025, the ice lantern was assembled in the courtyard of Tsuchikawa Shoten, accompanied by live jazz, and then lit at dusk. As the flame flickered within, the ice emitted a soft glow, with droplets falling steadily – each one marking the visible passage of time.

By dawn, the contours had softened. By afternoon, the lantern had quietly collapsed. The remaining fragments were placed in a large ceramic vessel, where ice floated in water. Throughout the exhibition, visitors encountered an absence – invited to imagine what had once stood there.

“This is not a work to be viewed. It is a work to be present for”, Honda explains.

A new aesthetic: Yūkan-bi

Honda terms this aesthetic Yūkan-bi. Japanese culture has long held an appreciation for the beauty inherent in transience: scattering cherry blossoms, vanishing dew, dancing fireflies. These phenomena move us precisely because they do not endure. Honda inherits this sensibility while reframing disappearance not as loss, but as a return to the cycle.

“Ice is merely water, paused. When it melts, it seeps into the earth, evaporates into the atmosphere, and someday falls as rain elsewhere in the world – perhaps to become an ice lantern once again. This work is a narrative of endings returning to beginnings”.

While Olafur Eliasson’s Ice Watch (2014) employed glacial ice to sound an urgent warning about climate change, Honda’s work offers a different meditation: reinterpreting the Buddhist idea of impermanence through the lens of prayer and hope.

Future plans

As a university student, Honda visited Levens Hall in England – an experience that profoundly shaped his decision to pursue garden design. Returning to that formative encounter, he hopes to present Kōri no Tōrō in the United Kingdom in the future.