A Look at the Legacy of Ceramicist Furuta Oribe from the Collection of Gordon Brodfuehrer

welcome to the Japanese Friendship Garden in Balboa Park San Diego California my name is Gordon Brad Fuhrer and I have installed a small part of my collection of contemporary Japanese ceramics focusing on Oda Bay where in order to tell a bit of a story about Fallujah Oda Bay who was an extraordinary Renaissance man in Japan at a time of great discord cruelty and mayhem which Nala be compared to the War of the Roses in England which we visit in Shakespeare's plays who'da to Otto Bay was born in 1543 as it happens the same year the Portuguese arrived that was to be a faithful date in his life because the imports that the Portuguese brought in with their trade the designs of fabrics from India porcelains from Holland all of these eventually had an effect on auda Bay's aesthetic and he eventually became an arbiter of a world of ceramics in Japan he was born into a high-ranking samurai family his father had been a trusted advisor to Oda Nobunaga who was a first uniting force of Japan Furuta went on to become a similar advisor to Toyotomi Hideyoshi who succeeded Nobunaga after the assassination of the great man Fudo too was very involved in the tea ceremony it's very hard for us to understand the incredible importance of the tea ceremony in Japan at this period it was a place where politics the fates of people taste future of Japanese history was determined there had been a tea master named Sen no Rikyu who wanted to turn away from the opulence of Chinese imports and the perfection of Chinese porcelain in embrace simplicity as a term the Japanese referred to as wabi-sabi something which looks like it has been used it has a certain modest rusticity about it and sunny Brook you designed tea rooms in which the samurai would have to take off their armor take off their swords essentially leave their egos outside of this room and come in and experience the simplicity of the tea ceremony with Sen no Rikyu sena Riccio eventually fell afoul of Hideyoshi and was compelled to commit suicide Furuta oughta be succeeded him as Hideyoshi's tea master he began to instruct ceramicist Potter's in new designs this was because he changed the tea ceremony to make it more friendly to the samurai disposition he certainly opened the door to the tea room he added many windows for views of gardens and designed and furnished a multitude of small shapes for the delicacies the foodstuffs which were served with the tea stramonium there is a quote by Mia Kimura saya from the Metro Museum of Art which I want to share with you never had so many different vessel shapes and such brilliant glazes been attempted and the profuse uninhibited designs both naturalistic and distract are so playful that they verge on what we think of as modern to the left here of our small exhibition you'll see some rice bowls and these have these semi abstract designs with iron glaze for the actual design itself and then copper glaze for the green addition to the work these shapes are for rice bowls they're very simple and modest with these spontaneous designs and these are from the 17th century we have no idea who the Potter may have been they certainly look to have a good deal of age on them but nevertheless their style is consistent with that period and the same style for hundreds of years later many things were made of this sort and they continued to be made in Japan for the next five hundred years but eventually the designs became a bit more sophisticated and here you will see some works by Makoto Yamaguchi of food plates with a much more sophisticated more elegant design aesthetic but still the copper glaze and the somewhat spontaneous and subjective treatment of the designs another design which photo introduced was in the tea balls which had been perfectly round Chinese models and he was willfully distorting and this tea bowl you see here is in the shape of a shoe or a clog and that was the kind of shape which delighted food hood or Bey and broke away from the formal traditions of Chinese art trays to serve food were also needed then as they are needed now there are two food trays here which I paired together because I have the strange conceit that the one on the left almost resembles a fish and the one on the right almost resembles a green pool with sandy shoals so I put those two together talking he she is the Potter of what I would call the fish plate and Yoshinobu Morimoto is the auto Bay square plate below that you'll see a extraordinary piece that's very large tray designed by Shotaro Hayashi which is an absolute extravaganza of texture and glaze and Colour so there's a wide wide range in what we call auto Bay where's but all recognizable by their design and by the glazed patterns you'll see three rectangular plates hanging on the wall here and those are also by Makoto Yamaguchi they're very simple but if you get close to them and look into them they have this kind of uncanny feeling of depth there's a great German painter named Gerhard Richter whose works often have this aspect that you sense layer upon layer when I look at these I sense water beneath moss and it's amazing what these potters can achieve with their experience in glaze you will see that not all of these works are this cobalt dark green some are black and that's called Kudo Otto Bay or black Otto Bay and next the tea Bowl you'll see a vessel for drinking soju a drink and below that is a tall tea vessel for larger amounts of tea in a black Otto Bay style next to that is a more year one and next to that is an incredible fanciful shape it's a riff on a vessel shape called the MU Kazuki which was served as a set with various small foodstuffs I think you'd be ill-advised to try to reach into this for some food I think you might come out with a bleeding finger or damage the object in the process autumn a ware also extended to kaki Hana or wall vases and you see one here signed by Tatsuhiko Ito quite beautiful example of Auto Bay where with an added cascade of glaze like a stream coming down a landscape and speaking of landscapes you'll see a very large vase by Makoto Yamaguchi with the peony inside of it and it has the rugged shape of a mountain it is like a piece of nature carved out just incredibly rich in colors in blues as yours greens blacks a wonderful thing to sit and ponder to the left of that is a small tray by Haruhiko tsukamoto it is another piece of nature it almost looks like a piece of petrified wood and he's given the name long dream star plate to this piece to the left of that is a much more monumental and ambitious and elegant piece by Shugo Takeuchi this has extreme elegance and opulence of glaze but it still has that strange little pattern of some vegetable or gourd or something hanging on its branches that you see in order Bay where for 500 years it's still that homage that reference to that now above this you'll see a piece of art which is not ceramic this is a lithograph by my friend Joel Stuart an artist who lives in Kyoto who is fascinated with all aspects of Japanese culture he's not a scholar but he has a wonderful eye he bicycles past a graveyard in Kyoto and he notices these lamps called Toto and it turns out that Oda Bay amongst the many other things he did was to design this shape of lamp and there's some suspicion that he was a secret Christian and that this has somehow has some reference across the stories abound that when you look at the base stones of these beneath them you'll see Christian inscriptions so this is a version of this total which auto-pay designed in a snow a heavy snow in kyoto they have something called botamochi these very thick moisture-laden snowflakes which are there because of the formation of the valley evidently on the other side of Joel's lithograph are some more pieces by Makoto Yamaguchi these oughta be rectangle plates I had them mounted this way because something seems to be just kind of drifting down they're very very delicate and very beautiful but you can see again the informality of the designs little touches of the of the copper glaze and you can imagine what a delight it is to to eat food off of these plates you know the Japanese character is this wonderful assortment of profundity seriousness great love of nature but also whimsical humor you'll see here a pair of candlesticks and you see the oughta be glazed with these figures on top called Kappas they are a folk legend mischievous creature that lives near water under bridges and do things as bad as pulling children into the water stealing things there's some suspicion that women could be impregnated by them mysteriously that happens in many cultures and then these ARLA fellows are sitting reading a book with these little caps on their head now the cat's not really a cap that's part of the the shapes of their heads because they're water creatures they always had to have that little bowl on their head full of water otherwise they would lose their powers so if you're walking along a country lane and you encountered a kapa which might be a very scary event you were instructed to deeply bow as the Japanese tend to do and the kapa would deeply bow and then the water would fall out and he'd be entirely powerless and you could go on your way I love that story this is another piece by the incredible potter sugar Takeuchi who lives in moscow but does it very much his own style ceramic this was too big to put in the cabinets in the galleries but I thought it would be nice to bring it out of its box and place it here in front of the beautiful koi pond you hear the waterfall in the background here at the Japanese garden it's a basin a water basin similar to those you might find Japanese temples where you do a ritual cleansing before you enter the temple it's an amazing piece to travel the exterior of this is amazing journey as matter of fact the Potter has called this endless landscape each section almost looks like a complete work of art totally different from one side to the other there are places where it almost looks like Aboriginal cave drawings have been put on the wall of a cave a wonderful array of colors and we put some water in the basin and I'm glad we did because it suddenly brought the bottom of that basin - it's a very silvery silver life it's a extraordinary piece I want to thank the Japanese guard from being so indulgent and helped me so much with assisting in this presentation well we've seen some of these incredible varieties of Auto Bay wear and to go back to mr. food auto Bao's I say a Renaissance man he had to become a warrior because in those days you had to support your leader of your clan in the turbo Wars which lasted a hundred years so he was a lawyer he was awarded land and he rose through the ranks but his real passion was for art for redesigning the Tea Room for changing the types of trees you would see in the classical Japanese garden for creating multiple shapes and styles of ceramics for for daily use and also designing this stone lantern which you see today all over Japan eventually he'll Yoshi himself lost power and was succeeded by Tokugawa Ieyasu Tokyo Edo became the capital and of course still is he was vehemently anti-christian and he felt that the Christians were having much too strong an influence in the country and started a very severe persecution of Christians it was thought that some of Otto BAE's family were Christian and he was compelled to commit ritual suicide there's a story that when he was at the siege of Osaka Castle he got too near the battlements and was struck by an arrow or something and had a minor wound and later that night evidently the samurai ridiculed him saying that polluter will never die in battle he will die from a fish bone very sad commentary but it also shows his incredible passion for beauty and for aesthetics he had only gotten near the castle battlements to examine some bamboo that he thought might make a perfect tea scoop for the tea ceremony his passion was for art unfortunately he lived at a time of great violence and had to join that world and eventually came to his end in that world I want to thank the people here at the Japanese Friendship Garden for their assistance and allowing me to have this overview of the traditions of food Oh to Otto Bay and I encourage you all to come to this magnificent garden which improves every day should you have any other curiosity about food ax to otto bay and would like to have further information there's an extraordinary book called turning point otto bay and the arts of 16th century japan published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in it you'll find a credible wealth of information and visual splendor thank you

Channel: Balboa Park Online Collaborative

Views: 16,372

Rating: 4.9359999 out of 5

Keywords: balboa park, san diego, ceramics, japan, japanese ceramics, furuta oribe, oribe ware, art

Id: bCoPoSnGWDI

Length: 14min 38sec (878 seconds)

Published: Tue May 10 2016