Ryohei Usui grew up in Shizuoka, Japan, and now lives and works in Tokyo. His practice begins with close observation of the city — the objects people leave behind, the small compositions that briefly appear on sidewalks and street corners before disappearing. In 2009 he began photographing discarded plastic bottles, noticing how each one seemed to carry the trace of whoever left it, like a contemporary portrait. After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, he began recreating those same bottles in glass — the same shapes, rendered in a material that is heavier, more permanent, and traditionally associated with craft and care. The series has continued ever since, accumulating into an ongoing portrait of daily urban life. His work is held by institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo and M+, Hong Kong.

For Sculpture Milwaukee, Usui sited this glass bottle in the urban landscape — placed at street level, it sits within the cityscape the way the original objects do, easy to overlook, quiet and not asking to be seen. This is his first outdoor installation and marks an opportunity for his glass bottle series to return to the public s that inspired the work.

Blue cap bottle (PET – Portrait of Encountered Things) is presented in collaboration with Mizuki Takezaki, a fellow of the Agency of Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan and a curator of the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art (MIMOCA) in Marugame, Japan. This work is part of Power of the Margins, Sculpture Milwaukee's 2026 exhibition.