Sayako Hiroi is a painter and kintsugi practitioner based in Malden, Massachusetts, with a studio in Allston. Born in Tokyo, she holds an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University.
Her paintings are large oil works that treat ukiyo-e, particularly bijinga and shunga, as a structural archive. She is interested in the gaze: how a body is looked at, in Japan and in the United States, and what it means for that body to look back. Her 2026 paintings were shown in a solo exhibition at the Umbrella Arts Center in Concord, and a solo exhibition at Hallspace in Boston opens in December 2026.
She also practices kintsugi, the Japanese craft of mending broken ceramics with urushi lacquer and gold. She first learned a simplified version of it, then taught herself the traditional urushi process, and she now works in both traditional and modern methods. She takes private repair commissions for ceramics, porcelain, and other broken objects, and teaches kintsugi in stages, from a two-hour introduction to a four-session foundation course in traditional urushi. She has led kintsugi workshops and talks at MIT, Harvard, the Boston Children’s Museum, the Umbrella Arts Center, and the Virginia Thurston Healing Garden, and she teaches studio art and portfolio preparation in the Boston area.
Painting and repair are one practice for her. Both begin with something damaged, and neither one hides the damage. In a workshop, that idea is not a statement. It is a bowl in your hands, a seam of gold, and an afternoon that cannot be hurried.
