"Accumulated Roads" Mosaic by Toyoharu Kii

In the mosaic “Accumulated Roads,” Toyoharu Kii describes the futility of man’s attempts to traverse and tame nature. The work portrays a tangle of once carefully aligned tesserea paths, now broken and falling ruin, a victim of disregard in nature’s relentless chaos.

A leader of the cross-cultural craft resurgence, Japan-based artist Toyoharu Kii creates his intricate mosaics with hand-cut Italian marble and smalti, Venetian glass made by the same Italian family for over 400 years. Using traditional Italian techniques, Kii’s art is nonetheless modern. It is monochromatic, abstract, and highly textured and highlights the involved and technical art of mosaic making.