Shifts in Japanese Materiality was first shown at the Japanese Foundation Gallery, Sydney. The concept behind the exhibition came from Bic Tieu, a Vietnamese jeweller living in Australia. While also subscribing to an Asian aesthetic and undertaking a serious study of Japanese lacquer (maki-e), Tieu makes jewellery in the Western style.

Tieu is interested in how other artists in Australia are also influenced by Japanese aesthetics and materials. Bic Tieu's rings, brooches and pendants refer back to the Japanese love of subtle textures and surface colourations. In her romantic series Mapping Floral Imagery the surfaces of the small jewellery pieces are built up in overlapping contrasting shapes like landscapes with delicate contrasting textures of silver, copper and gold leaf. In some works mother of pearl and fragments of sea shells are used to reflect light and add shimmering highlights.

Other artists in the exhibition may eschew traditional materials but subscribe to an Asian sensibility. The materials these artists use become significant carriers of their political statements about the environment. This is exemplified by Kyoko Hashimoto who references the form of a traditional Japanese nenju necklace used by monks for meditation but makes the beads from discarded plastic toys. Rui Kikuchi's jewellery is constructed and cut from discarded PET bottles and plastic compounds. She recycles this plastic into small feathery sea- like creatures that float from the gallery ceiling and colourful floral brooches. Her recycling of this plastic as a material for creativity highlights its alternative fate as a pollutant of the seas as plastic waste.

Guy Keulemans and Kyoko Hashimoto make this point more graphically with their white wooden cubes. Their pristine surfaces are violated by being cut open to reveal inside a nefarious welded mass of junk - a potent indication of the plastic garbage under the surface of the sea and in landfill. And although Julie Bartholomew's Japanese wooden shoes (kappori geta) are in a traditional form, they are made in ceramic and carry the images of global brands signifying a form of consumerism that swallows up traditional cultures.

Both Al Munro and Gilbert Riedelbauch in their two solo exhibitions are very much concerned with transformational processes and digital technologies. They both work with digitally generated forms and the handmade object to explore the process of transforming two dimensional sketches into three-dimensional objects.

Munro uses digital technology to manipulate patterns in a two-way process between traditional painting and digital generated printing. The artist is interested in the transfer of designs between each of the processes where slippages and changes can occur bringing an element of chance into what can seem a mechanical process.

Riedelbauch's small wall sculptures form an inter-changeable visual language of geometric motifs and symbols based on architectural practice. He draws the models for his sculptures then uses a computer controlled router to cut out his forms in composite aluminium before completing them manually.

Their attraction lies in the soft shine of the metal (4 Star Silver) and the brilliant gloss of the red and black surfaces (Heart gloss red/black). Their industrial appearance is enlivened by their playful but sophisticated combinations of shapes and motifs enlivened by the inviting surface intensity of gloss red and black.