Contemporary Japanese Ceramics from the Collection of Gordon Brodfuehrer

Ceramics have been made in Japan for 12,000 years it's part of the the collective unconscious of the Japanese people the ceramics are just a part of their life I've often joked that if you do a thorough blood test of any Japanese you'll find some clay the famous kilns are the six ancient kilns and they're in areas to the south of Tokyo and around Kyoto which was the imperial capital we're going to explore several of these styles now some of the styles are related to the place where the ceramics come from and other styles are related to the process by which they're made in this case they are made all over Japan but use a certain process we're going to start with be Zen where Beason ware has been a staple of utilitarian ceramics for a thousand years there are now young Potter's who have taken it a step further and do some works which are utilitarian but are quite beautiful this is a vase by young Potter named Yamashita Joji now the usual characteristic of be Zen where is the ash clay is the only glaze you find on the on the object is from the red pine ash which is in the kiln for ten to twenty days huge amounts of pine wood the ash is heated to the point where it descends in a liquid form it becomes glazed looking at this you'll say where is the ash glaze there is no ash glaze in this piece this Potter took pains to cover this in the kiln so no ash would actually descend upon the surface he wanted to accent something else which happened by happenstance in the Beason area they used to put wet a seaweed or straw in between the pieces so they would not stick to get in the kiln and when they did that they burned away and mineral deposits were left leaving this very warm sienna orange color and these patterns the name for that was hidden tsuki which refers to the cord the Japanese women used to hold duck the sleeve of their kimono when they are working and you'll see this has one full array of these designs it's a large piece but he's given it a certain kind of elegance by this very slender line which is almost like a slice of the moon and then when you look at the mouth of the piece it also has some resemblance to the moon if we go on to the next piece you will now see how ash glaze is used in bees M the O key Yokoyama has devised some techniques which are not common for ordinary implements he's taken two colors of clay and he's combined them and you get this wonderful swirl of red and white incredibly dynamic when I first saw this online from my dealer Robert Yellen and Kyoto I was put in mind of the heavy impasto and the violent oil on a van Gogh painting I think you'll see what I'm getting at but it's very very vibrant almost violent swirl of energy on the sides it cools down and I sometimes I think that pieces have a face which is the part you really want to see and I had described this to a friend of mine at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in that way but she walked around to the back and said well if you regard this as the swirling Sun surely you would look at the back of this and call this the night and that circle there is too perfect to be a kiln accident it was intentional and again it's a large-scale but he's given it a elegance in a certain mystery by having the mouth of the vase disappear Shigure aki is just outside of Kyoto it's been a potting center again for a thousand or more years this is very much like a an object that I had Co purchased with the Clark center for Japanese art and I had it on my living room coffee table and I was a little nervous because of its fragility so I said please take this away but then I missed it so when I was in Kyoto I met the Potter and I purchased this his works are incredible contradiction this looks so fragile but the same time so violent you can't really decide if it's falling apart or whether it's taking form but if you think of this thought you'll remember that those things are not important because they're happening all the time at the same time becoming ending the eternal cycle so what you need to focus on is not this chaos but look inside and see this serene emerald green pool of Buddha compassion I decided to pair many these pieces with photographs because I'm of the firm opinion that Japanese ceramics strongly reflect Japanese nature Taiji dou ito is a dealer in Tokyo but he's also an avid nature photographer and fortunately he has archives going about a decade so I could go back and pick out works that I thought would have a compelling conversation with the ceramic and you see here tranquil dark green pool with the variety of nature happening and around it rock and snow and twig and the great richness we see in nature but behind that is this very calm basis on which it all rests I was in Tokyo a visiting Taiji toe and he took me and a friend out to the Kyoto Museum at the foot of Mount Fuji and he wanted to go up to the fifth station which as far as you can drive and to see the spectacular view and it was getting late and I discovered that photographers have a deficit of hearing when they have a camera in their hand we all wanted to leave and he was taking pictures but I'm delighted we stayed because he took this picture at sunset which has this wonderful kind of horizontal energy from the wind which I see mirrored in this piece of sugar Aki where you'll see that this was fired on the shells this is the bottom that we're looking at it rested on these shells then the ash glaze came and embraced the object and settled in these concretion x' of glaze called eye of the dragonfly which are highly prized by Japanese Potter's but you can think of wind on Mont Fuji but also can think of win and the incredible energy within the kiln Shikha Rocky's characteristics are very rough clay with a white feldspar stone in it you see here something called a kekkai hana a wall vase which are very common at the top you'll see the ash glaze at the bottom you see more of the play itself and below that we have a cha one a tea bowl with a bit of ash glaze on the lip I think very artfully placed there are artists you'd call studio artists who do things which are not strictly informed by origin or style this is a mazing piece of art it's a myth Susy she which is a water container for the tea ceremony it is shaped like a persimmon but all those lines you see were created by excising those spaces and having clay inlaid it is like a mosaic requiring the most incredible patience and craft you opened up the lid of this it's all gold on the inside it is an amazingly elegant piece of art but it Parkins back to me to the Japanese love of persimmons if you've been in Japan in the fall when the leaves start to fall off the trees or when the snow comes later you'll see this trees are often covered with persimmons they chose not to pick because that rich color almost like a Christmas tree ornament that kind of warm orange a lot almost lacquer color that sometimes they put them on strings around their doors this tray is another piece of B Zen where my dealer Robert Yellen was driving me through B Zen and meeting some potters and as we're coming towards Oklahoma City to inland see late afternoon the Sun was starting to go down hazy and the Sun had the same distortion that you see in these marks called botamochi this is something they use and busy and all the time but also it's something which they happened upon when they had a thousand objects in the kiln they had to stack them where they had an object on which they were stacking something the clay was exposed below so you have this vibrant clay coming through the baked clay and he added the other two elements hit at tsuki you see those two lines coming down like wispy clouds going across the Sun wakamoto Hiroyuki is a very very famous Potter in the Zen but curiously enough he and the other most famous Potter did not come from there they both came from an island of the Shore of Kyushu to the west the other Potter has named cocoon is Aki ryoichi who well a rock star I think that's what people call them in Japan we went to his compound which is like a compound in the Hamptons and I wanted to buy something but I thought well I'll get something modest because the prices connect with his reputation so I asked to see some wall vases he said he hadn't made them for decades and decades but he would go find what he could for me he came back with about five of them four were regular beautiful wall vases this one was so quirky that it drew my attention to it and I said tell me about this one and he said that when he had seen the pictures in the newspaper when Chernobyl exploded and the cities in the south of Russia the streets were all littered with dead birds he made a large number of these as many as perhaps 150 and he had an opening in a gallery in Tokyo and when you walked in the floor was covered with these dead birds and below this you see a piece by a Jiki hero and I think the people are at the main gate were absolutely inspired by putting these two pieces together because this kind of primitive almost prehistoric anthropomorphic figure is juxtaposed with this brutalized nature over the hills from Shigure Aki is an area called ego ego was most famous for being the foundry the university the ninja the professional assassins who came in the night all dressed in black and doan saw them coming or going but they left death and destruction behind when the emperor was reinstalled the Meiji iteration the ninja were suppressed and I think ego was tainted by that association but one Potter named shoe hai Fujioka devote his life to resurrecting the refutation of ego where I had gone out to have lunch with Yoshitaka hasu this Potter and I was dining off of his own ceramics and found myself without any self control at all asking if I could buy everything I was eating from so if you see the beauty of these incredible abstract impressionistic signs that are so compelling you might forgive my lack of good manners there was system he's a flaming yarn with a sprinkle of fresh tear are going on top and it was stunning food and ceramics are very very important to Japan mr. house who makes ceramics for some of the most celebrated restaurants in Tokyo I saw this piece in the corner and I asked about it and he said well I didn't think Americans would be interested in this because it was broken and if you look up at the top you'll see a gold lacquer repair lines and actually the back of it is something of a roadmap of repairs first of all I think it's an amazing composition it has the three elements of ego where the scorching at the bottom the clay and the ash glaze which is so incredibly controlled here there are so amazing these potters how they learn to control the events over which they would seem to have no control in the kiln also this would teach a good lesson in the United States but in Japan objects acquire more respect more value more reverence from being used you would not see a vast array of vessels and this has been I think quite aptly dubbed the sake aquarium these are for the most part devices for pouring sake or devices out of which you would drink sake one of the titles of the exhibition has the word nature and if you look at some of these objects you will see a slice of bamboo and these two you know me these sake vessels are for all the world like some of the more exotic fruits you see at Whole Foods used to only see them in markets in Thailand Eitoku tea and to Riga style we know me vessels you've been to Japan you'll see that the Japanese are fond of all things that come from the sea and they actually eat most of them this glaze you see at the top of this large Saki vessel is called a sea cucumber glaze and if you've ever seen a sea cucumber they actually have that rich patterning on them this tiny little vessel for pouring sake is from Tonga Tonga is for a thousand years has made large Sokka vessels for restaurants and hotels and things and this is the smallest one I've ever seen and they often have some slip on them designating the business they're associated with next to that is a lovely we know me by a famous artist in Rio Chico a who I think is very influenced by the West because I always look at this and I see Robert Motherwell moving along we'll see some different styles here you see two pieces by Ken matsuzaki employing a heavy glaze called she know she know is practiced all over Japan is not from one area ken Matsuzaka lives up in the Northeast his kiln was destroyed in the earthquake but vernian sue Parker of the Parker gallery in Boston who represent him raised money to rebuild his kiln and he's not producing these beautiful beautiful things again this is from hoggie where this deep blue glaze is one of the glazes you'll find in hoggie these two you know me are all about design the clay is not important here because these are examples of here we're from kyoto and kyoto being the imperial capital had extremely elegant taste so design was very very important and these seem to be merging into the art deco kind of design here we see some more examples of she know where these two pieces are by ken matsuzaki and if you look at that heavy shino glaze people think of whipping cream shaving cream i think of it as a froth of sea waves kind of battering against each other in a playful manner this tray in the middle i purchased some years ago it reminded me so much if you've been raised in snow country that when the fall comes you begin to see these dirty little eddies of streams appear beneath the melting snow and this looks so much like that to the left of that is a shell form essentially an oyster which has been made into a piece of Ishino glaze and if you think of this with a few maybe daffodils or flowers leaning forward out the front you have an example of how beautifully these objects can be used Oda Bay is one of those styles which is not related to a certain place came into being in the great momentum a period of when the tea ceremony became so important there was a tea master named auda Bay and this glaze is named after him this particular Potter does not make functional pieces this is the only Hughley a sculptural piece I have on the show it's open on the inside it's a wonderful swirl of opposing energy kind of like the fan dance with kimonos where you have fabric swaying in different directions he has a straw Denari technique which he's devised must be incredibly arduous which truly fascinates Potter's when they come to see it this dark green is what you usually think of as Otto bei glaze but it has other colors as well which we'll see Shingo Takeuchi is someone also who does zou Gong this in laying technique he's taking it a step further by taking each of those inlaid areas and framing them in gold to make something incredibly artful and elegant at the same time very playful playfulness is a very important element in Japanese art beside that you'll see two pieces of porcelain with a beautiful deep blue and next to that are four again ami by a young man who went to university to study philosophy and I thought you take a ceramic course for fun and that was the end of his career in philosophy he's now a very sought-after Potter in Kyoto the second smallest of these UNAMI is called in bish you know meaning on fires you know and if you see that in the right light it's like molten volcano coming at you it's just so striking and so beautiful getting back to Oda Bay where or Bay where was used for all kinds of functional things trays and tea bowls and it often had depicted very very everyday kind of things like a wheel or a fence or some grasses very simple everyday objects that you might see on any day in Tokyo Kyoto and this powder has taken that up to the current time and on the inside you'll see TV antennas and cars but on the outside he still pays his respect to Fujisan this Potter was a student of kakizaki yuuichi Takeda Ichi is when my favorite Potter's I think has wonderful elegance but strength also in his work two kinds of vessels were pouring sake one is the daiquiri which I little flask or this kind of pitcher called a Kotaku chi and this is made by a young japanese-american powder who lives north of seattle now we come to the word tradition some of these traditions go back many many generations of 15 16 17 generations of potters this is a short-lived tradition but a very vibrant and productive one the piece at the top the tall vase form is by Shiro tsujimoto he and his wife had studied painting and after the war there was no economy in Japan the place was just a shattered so they went up into the hills above Nara and built a house and he began to make implements out of clay and he would take them down to the great temple and they had had temple sales and people would buy these objects he made more they bought more and it continued until he's now the most famous Potter perhaps in Japan an extremely famous powder all over the world there's an exhibition in New York City of his work and New York Times critic approached it not as ceramic but as landscape painting he has two sons who are Potter's this large subo this roundish vessel is by Chi su jhamora and you see an example of the wonderful things the energy and the kiln where the ash glaze sweeps across the this beautiful vibrant clay his other son Yui designed this large vessel which I saw at the epital Gary in New York City and choco the proprietor had a wooden ladle on that so it looked like one of those wonderful bowls he used to put water on your hands to cleanse yourself before you go into a Buddhist or perhaps even a Shinto temple this has been formalized by pinching in the sides so it has these lobes which remind you of Lotus and as a matter of fact if you look at the bottom you will see the leaves of the Lotus as well this kind of wear is very ancient in Japan and had been kind of neglected the fifth century AD tsuzuku where had been made and highly prized by the aristocracy it has this light greenish blue glaze and probably originally came from Japanese colonies in the south of Korea he's put in these clam shells which catch the ash glaze and give it an even more powerful design format it's a lovely piece I was not going to buy this because it was a bit expensive but a friend of mine urged me to do so and then we went to the Metropolitan Museum for lunch thereafter and I went to the Japanese galleries and they had just very recently purchased a large sumo by you eat Suja Mora so I felt much better about my purchase at that point calligraphy is also an important art form in Asia and no place more important than Japan the calligraphy you see in the wall is by shiro tsujimoto the father and the characters are earth water fire the things you need to produce ceramics very straightforward here you see some tea objects this is a mitsuhashi of hoggie where jamani sagen that's a blue that he has kind of made his signature color you see here some Shino tea bowls of almost embarrassing opulence I mean I'm not sure this is really Japanese taste but I found it kind of irresistible for us just over the top Baroque flow of glaze which has essentially become almost glass this style of huggy wear is called the devil's brain always squirming and never arrests evidently if you see an e in a - before any of these styles it means that something has been painted on them something is representational and you see here since simple grasses or fences very very subtle references but that's a Shino a piece of where this yellow vase with a little dollop of white glaze at the top by a very talented Potter who died far too young here you have it a cabbage leaf masquerading as a tea bowl again by us - Ishii on my favorite powders another great huggie ceramicist ho Sai Buddha gawe also died far too early and this is a piece which astonished some of the dealers had never seen anything quite this large by him is a mountain scape and almost miraculously Taiji Rio had this photograph which I think spoke to it so beautifully and you wonder why is the Potter making a mountain scape a lot of the traditions and the history of Japan came from China through Korea and if you know Chinese history at all you know there have been periods when the established dynasties were overrun from the north and the most tragic and wrenching was when the Ming Dynasty fell to the Manchus when that happened many of the court painters and poets the so-called literati who the manchu are trying to co-opt and make part of their administration left the capital went out in a nature which of the bamboo groves went to the mountain brothers drank plum wine painted composed poetry and came recluses from the corrupt world and if you look inside this piece you'll see a gathering of little monks or literati there and this tradition is very strong in Japan as well going out to nature to seek enlightenment and also to flee all those distractions which life presents us with here we have a family which is the most famous perhaps for Hoggy where many many many generations the mooa family you see is incredible glaze which they control so amazingly and behind the glaze the clay has taken on this very dark color and they refer to that as snow on cherry bark this is a very porous kind of clay although this is a vase you can't put water into it but they have a perfectly made copper insert into which you can put water and you can put fresh flowers more Auto Bay where this is one of the largest trays I have ever seen it was on the desk of one of my dealers in Kyoto Robert Mangold and I think he told me that he kept it there just to raffle Potter's who'd come in who would look at it and say how did he take something that heavy and get it into the kiln and out in one piece it's a tray it should be used sitting on its back but the people at the main gate Museum here indulged me by installing it in this rather strange position because for me it looks like a bamboo grove Taji oh did not have a picture of bamboo grove he liked enough so he got this card he went to come accrue a very famous temple and bamboo grove and took a number of pictures and this one has just the right contrast of the light and the dark on the bamboo to have I think a perfect conversation with this huge beautiful tray some more Auto Bay where these two pieces on the left the tall vase form and the tray were produced by cattle Yasuko gay the 14th he had taken the family name and very very promising talent one of the the great young Potter's in Japan who tragically went to a picnic it was rained out on the way back he lost control of his car went off the road and was killed leaving no one to assume this venerable family name now this is a major tragedy in Japan maybe it's hard to imagine in this country but this is a major national tragedy so we hope that someday someone will marry into the family and then he will take the family name and continue the tradition there in the back you see a kind of a jar a vase or a jar form which is kind of a fusion of Shino and OTO bay by ken matsuzaki and this is a tall littered vessel which alludes again to nature that kind of waterfall motif you see a lot in Japanese ceramics and this waterfall looks like that water which comes out of glacial lakes so white with with minerals it's a beautiful piece by a Potter whose works are very hard to find they have openings that his works and before the doors are opened they're all sold if you go as far west as you can go in Japan the Kyushu in the west coast you'll come to karatsu karatsu is a place where many korean potters settled either forcibly brought there from korea or live there multi generations and had a profound influence on Japanese ceramics this kind of glaze effect is called Choson karatsu which refers to this glaze and in this case I had seen this photograph by Ty Jiro when he went to karatsu and and I found this wonderful tray form in a gallery in yato Utz owacan a very fine very fine gallery and it was that moment it was wonderful to see them together celadon is a kind of ceramic which comes from China perhaps it was so close to Jade it was something made to approximate Jade which is so rare and so difficult to form this particular master of celadon psycho Minegishi has developed these techniques for this crackling which looks like it's eternal like layer upon layer upon layer of crackling it's a very formal piece has great dignity but it has this incredible vibrancy of thewe by way of the crackling and so I just thought of that like uncovered stone where the lichen super imposes itself on other lichen and it builds and builds and builds went Agito was in karatsu he took a picture of this kind of dragon tree and then later found this large tray which reminded him very much of the tree he'd just seen it has some of the classic Chinese motifs it's kind of bat which is a homophone form for wealth as well as bat in Chinese again some design elements are celebrated in Japan which originally came from China I had mentioned tan beware as a place where they had made sake vessels for many many years it's kind of off by itself you'd have to go there to go there it's not on the way it is somewhere else a beautiful beautiful area in the mountains but wherever there are ceramics made even for the most utilitarian purposes they're going to be people who want to do something individual and expressive and this young man who's at touching stone gallery and Santa Fe has done some very very elegant restrained pieces this kind of a bowtie looking thing it would be perfect with its one blossom and that kind of Leaning vase form which sometimes I think it jokingly looks like a Claus Oldenburg cigarette stub it's also would be beautiful with flowers leaning forward and a little tray for just serving some tea sweets this is another wonderful Potter who lives in Tonga but really does things very much in his own style he's a great favorite of robert Yellen Kotoko to me when I first showed this to some people they thought oh that's it's so cute I used to teach piano and they said oh you found something with musical notes and I said well no those aren't musical notes those are a design motif in Japanese art it's the fiddlehead fern and hi Jiro did not have a picture of the fiddlehead firm but he raced down either to the florist to the drugstore and he found this one which i think is absolute elegant masterpiece it looks like lacquer ware and the light is so beautiful many potters as I said come from strong traditions some do not and this is definitely one who did not yukia Izumi taw was a salaryman that's one of the people you see on the trains in their dark suit and their polish shoes and their briefcases going back and forth to work to make the economy of Japan chug right along he got fed up with that evidently and went up to ewot a province up in the Northeast and some land he did takes some instruction from some Potter's but his work is what I call the sua generous have his own inspiration this is also a piece which confounds Potter's it has a cylinder on the inside it's a vase form you can put water and flowers you see it from the side and you see tremendous glints of gold and silver very metallic looking one the Reverend gentleman referred to it as a radiator but that's all right you see what you see Tajiri Oh does not have a picture of what happens inside the earth and what happens inside the earth is a vital interest to this powder and that should not be too surprising to us this country Japan has suffered so much from seismic events from earthquakes that what happens beneath the earth's crust is a very paramount interest and if you look at this form you can almost see a spring-like shape like energy about to push up so Tajiri took this photograph of not beneath the earth but it reveals what happens as layers of the earth disappear and leaving others behind this other piece by E so Mita also could refer to a seismic event in earthquakes things are thrust up but sometimes they collapse if you think of this as a perfect plane which collapsed onto its off then you can make that connection very very thin clay very dramatic form very nerve-wracking to move but such a stunning piece of art and you'll see nothing like this by any other powder I think in the world tokonoma is one of the six ancient kilns and it was most famous for the last several centuries as the maker of ceramic sewer pipes but again there are ceramicists who want to do something original their own statement and this Konishi Yohai made this wonderful swirling vase with ash glaze and with some device he gave it this kind of reptilian scale like surface which only adds to its visual interest this piece is the only one I have which is coiled that is it's pieces of clay are meeting the coils to form this larger piece this is called first snow of spring and there's a wonderful photograph which reacquaint sus with that event when we think spring is here and everything is leafing out and all of a sudden a storm comes in and we're back in the winter time again the powder has taken his thumb or other finger not sure which made all these little indentations where the glaze can gather to give it this wonderful appearance it's a very beautiful very dramatic work here are three pieces of bees n where this very strange form by kakizaki Ryoichi underlines my earlier statement that when they came to be Zen they did things which the city fathers had never seen before this looks a little bit like something out of science fiction that's a very audacious form on this large flower vessel you'll see this accretion of this yellow surface called goombah sesame seed in Japanese and that's what the ash glaze does when it settles at the top and then at the bottom you have this incredibly rich kind of aubergine a color of the clay this is a young Potter who's doing some really wonderful work it's kind of a boat form and it's a large form but he's given it a lot of energy and lightness by cutting out these moon shape areas and putting in these swirling lines which gives it a certain kind of dynamic energy we'll look at another piece of celadon I had seen a piece like this in the vaults of LA County Museum and was quite enthusiastic about the powder a great celadon Potter who manages to create these planes of different colors of solid on different crackling patterns then he takes each of these planes and he kind of frames them I presume by taking off some of the glaze to let some of the clay reveal itself it reminded me initially of a Japanese a multi panel folding screen that hadn't been properly folded back together again really quite a dramatic and beautiful P it's a great favorite of many people this last piece is by a woman Potter very very creative as a wonderful kind of imaginative spirit and this is called Kagan Falls many of her pieces depict waterfalls or some similar natural phenomenon kagan Falls is a waterfall up above an eco and it's very famous in Japanese history and poetry as a place where people would go to write one last perfect poem and then throw themselves into the torrent and commit suicide this photograph is kind of like a negative because here the water is white and the surrounding stone is brown and in her piece the torrent seems to be brown and the surrounding area white but they really seem to co-exist together in a wonderful way I feel so pleased to have brought these works to the public's attention many people have no idea about this very very rich art form of contemporary Japanese ceramics and these are great artists craft and nature are so important to the Japanese and that combination of craft which goes beyond almost human endurance and inspiration from nature is very moving to me and I hope it has been to you you

Channel: Balboa Park Online Collaborative

Views: 129,399

Keywords: san diego, balboa park, ceramics, japan, mingei, japanese ceramics, art, contemporary, collection

Id: fBSIQUj9ybY

Length: 35min 19sec (2119 seconds)

Published: Tue May 10 2016