Member Lecture: Radical Clay — Unexpected Ceramics from Japan

right uh good afternoon and welcome everyone uh it's wonderful to have all of you here uh it's very exciting to see so many of you coming back and uh it is really meaningful to us um taang PRI chair of Arts of Asia and executive director of initiatives in Asia uh it is my pleasure to welcome you to the first program for the exibition opening yesterday radical clay contemporary women artists from Japan uh the exhibition is curated By Janice Kates the Roger Western associate curator of Japanese art at the Art Institute uh Janice is a I'm sure she doesn't need much introduction and she's a vital member of the museum and the student or Japanese collections uh she introduced audience to Japanese artists through quarterly print rotations your well know and in the gallery 107 and uh she also created a number of major exibitions including uh 20198 uh painting the floating word we masterpieces from the Western Collection uh the current exibition radical clay features 36 36 contemporary ceramic artists or women who define gender imposed constraints through groundbreaking ambitious and unconventional work in Clay on behalf of all of us at the Art Institute I want to especially thank Carol and Jeffrey Hovis all 40 pieces in the exhibition are from their exemplary collection and we are honored to share those artists and the works with a global audience I'm delighted to share uh that both Carol and Jeffrey are here with uh us today and please join me in welcoming Jeffrey to the stage uh just to share a few words and maybe some stories about the collection of uh the bit up over the decades Jeffrey thank you uh thank you all for coming I will say just a few words which is not my Norm uh actually first Carol can you just stand up so people can see who you are she is the originator of the idea in the show uh the pieces are uh very carefully selected from our uh collection of Japanese contemporary Ceramics meaning really from about 1950 to yesterday of about 1,500 pieces if you wonder why it's the largest don't ask that's a long story but it's the largest such collection outside of Japan public or private and it's used primarily for public purposes loaning uh gifts exhibitions among uh more than 30 us museums I wanted to just sort of briefly tell you a little bit about what what we do in our relationship to the artist and what we've seen we started collecting in 2008 very very modestly although we did have a collection policy being experienced with other collections we've been to Japan I think seven times at averaging about two weeks each primarily to see the uh best available ceramic artist and to see dealers primarily in Tokyo and Kyoto but also out in the middle of nowhere sometimes to understand the artist is actually not that difficult they are remarkably normal in the main the exception might be Mish Kimo who is uh I think in her well into her 80s and is quite diminutive she and I have gone through exhibitions together she doesn't speak English I don't speak Japanese and we have absolutely clear communication and she can eat and drink me under the table the what what we found in talking to the artists is while they are normal in their personal lives they are essentially exceptional in their skills and their motivation and their Vision as a group the Japanese ceramic artist certainly in the Contemporary field are the finest group in the world there's some 300 of them male and female that are kind of at the top of the of the profession in the world so it's the largest concentration thereof and the tradition of Ceramics in Japan of course is fundamental to all the art forms in Japan it's not it's called craft even there uh variously poy or different word depending on context but in fact it is seen as an art form one of the things about the exhibition is all the works are by women now if you go in there and look at them I would suggest to you that you not think of them as being done by women because there's nothing about them that tells you that they're feminine and when we go to visit them most of the women from the successive Generations some who are literally Pioneers for women in the Contemporary field are people who don't see themselves as female artists they see themselves as artists they are all dead serious about their work but their lives are relatively normal the first generation are people now in their 70s 80s and probably even approaching 90 uh sioui actually did not live quite long enough for the opening exhibition and their experiences were more difficult we heard on our last trip that today this may be off-putting to those who think that this is highly special but 70% of The Graduate students in the department of Ceramics now may be female that is an extraordinary change I'm not sure we played a major part our major role in this is exposing the work of these people to a world outside of Japan and in Japan they are less appreciated generally speaking than here and in Europe many of them of what I'll call the intermediate generation that we've known have actually uh either moved or working in Europe primarily London and Paris they see themselves as International and and yet there's always a part of it that is Japanese um one of the experiences we had was see Naki Amayo and his wife kitamura junko so you'll see both uh a piece by kitamura junko in the exhibition it's the dark bowl with little white dots all over it those are done freehand I was astonished to see it they have a nice Studio that they built for themselves outside of Tokyo and um if you need to see an aiam yo if you go to the atrium we've gifted one of the two largest pieces in America by the foremost sculptor ceramist in Japan and that's her husband the two could not be more different and we've seen this before uh many of the artists that uh are represented in the collection are artists who are married to other ceramic artists and their works are mostly polar opposite it's quite something to see we saw a demo of AO and Kor drunko together there's a certain amount of tension between the two um as his work is powerful earthy sort of tortured hers is meticulous obsessive and you'll also see with some of the artists this obsessiveness where process and product are not distinguishable and there's a long tradition in Japan about that so generally speaking I think you should I would Ser Ur you to First Look at the materially in the exhibition as just the objects not gender specific you won't really be able to discern correctly the gender anyway one of the other things we do though when we go to Japan is especially for the younger and mid-career early mid-career artists we try to support them by encouraging them to do more major work and one of the ways we encourage that is by purchasing it so for tanaku one of the most popular ceramic Arts Japan right now the yellow WRA cloth uh simulacrum um we I think we purchased almost the entirety of her yearly production of large pieces to give to museums all of whom want them and we've tried to do certainly we were an early Patron for for Fu chicasa who on our second visit we didn't actually know where the first visit the second visit I'm talking to her she's got a back brace on she doesn't have enough money for a sculpture table to raise it and lower it she doesn't yet have children and she tells me through a translator that well she thinks she's going to she's she's got a fiance she's going to get married have babies and maybe she'll stop doing Ceramics I just looked at her and said no you're not fast forward to the next trip her husband who was an artist himself took a real paying job and is supporting her and she's a superstar although she does the first child hangs on her leg making it kind of hard to deal with the relatively soft clay that she's forming on an Armature so every story is different I could do this for 3 hours and tell you all sorts of stories about our interactions with the is we we've we actually physically met half of the more than half maybe of the artists in the show often of their place their homes and studios are often the same but not always we've also met them though at some other gallery or space they've rented because they live in very small spaces and they don't have a space to show even in their own Studios and they're a little bit I think they're a little bit embarrassed and it's normal in Japan even for business dinners and so forth to entertain outside the home uh but we've also had some of the artists some of the most major living artists come to the house we have, 1500 square feet of display space in a very large house happen to be built by the Widow of the partner Marshall Fields and that is um sort of the short version of our many many many days in Japan so I hope you enjoy the show Carol and I will probably be able to be in the gallery after the talk if any of you want to chat about things or hear stories or just look with us we're more than happy to do that so I'm going to turn this over to Janice who will actually tell you something about the material actually quite a lot of things about the material and the [Applause] [Music] artists hello good afternoon thank you ta and thank you so much Jeffrey it is great to have you and Carol with us and it has been such a pleasure to research and display the works in your collection for this exhibition and I'm especially glad that we could hear from you today collectors are often behind the scenes but they are vitally important and as you heard they can directly encourage artists take them from obscurity into the Limelight contextualize their work within Collections and bring the artists to the attention of curators like me I have learned and Contin continue to learn so much from you and Carol and we all benefit from your knowledge and enthusiasm in sharing the work of these artists with us in Chicago as tal mentioned all of the works in the exhibition are selected from the horvat's extensive collection of contemporary Ceramics and as Jeffrey mentioned it is the largest collection uh of such material outside of Japan I'm thrilled to be speaking to you on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition radical clay at the Art Institute of Chicago and while contemporary Ceramics are not my main main area of focus within Japanese art when presented with the opportunity we quickly realized that this exhibition would align not only with what the Art Institute has been doing for decades that is bringing the newest wave of contemporary Japanese ceramics to an American audience but also that it was the right time for us to focus on women artists as their work continues to fulfill its potential as Cutting Edge contemporary art there have been shows of women artists before not enough but they have been done and done well as uh Carol recently stated uh we our exhibition is walking through the door open by previous shows and I love that phrase so much so what is different about our presentation first of all the Art Institute has a solid history history of being at the Forefront of Contemporary Art and particularly Japanese contemporary art as I'll explain in a minute also as a museum showcasing art artwork from around the globe we can situate these artist Creations to foster a dialogue with Contemporary Art the world over in a large public City Museum and I'm showing you here some installation photos uh with in the gallery uh created by Japanese architect Ando Tad which is one of two galleries of the exhibition and in the center here that large piece over there you can see expanding outward like a rotating tornado is Fuji Kasa satu satu uh seraphim and it is one of the revelations of the show in my opinion also as a group these artists have a vision beyond what others are doing in the field they're far less interested in and bound by tradition than many contemporary ceramicists at work in Japan this can perhaps be said to be the result of their training either at prestigious Artmy or abroad not as apprentices at established kils and this ability to innovate to invent new ways of working with clay and glaze and the skill of each artist to carve out their strength and unique process is what makes these works so awe inspiring and unusual when you think of Japanese ceramics I bet for most of you you do not Envision anything like this nothing like this comes to mind and here I'm showing you Tomita Miko's form of the progenitor in the foreground with its Jewel like embossed over overglaze enamel porcelain with Gold Elements let me say that again it's embossed overglaze enamel porcelain just that alone is technically incredible I had to have it of course in the center of the gallery to greet you as you walk in and to get a bit more granular within the works in the exhibition there's a strong focus on Surface whether shiny or mat and a focus on representations of the body as in oi Saka hiding Apple skull which you see on the left and matsuda uos In Her Shoes there's Al which is which is the leg or boot as it were uh there's also a strain of the strange or the creepy the grotesque throughout the exhibition the Pinnacle of which is kawaura saki's looking for a crush that seems to be a bloody heart and the last point I want to make about our presentation in general is that it features artists of several Generations from the 1970s to today many of the younger artists are just making a name for themselves there are artists who've not been included in museum exhibitions before and these artists work cannot be seen in too many places especially outside of Japan yet Ka Saki is one such artist historically women have largely been kept apart from the creative process of Ceramics and when they were involved had certain supporting roles such as preparing the clay preparing the glazes or as Kil managers for their for their husbands or fathers there are exceptions of course uh historically but they are few while long a center for contemporary Japanese art the Art Institute is typical among comparable institutions in that it has rarely included women artists within its exhibitions and Acquisitions in the 1950s and 1960s exhibitions of the work of contemporary ceramic artists were held here that featured male Japanese artists working in traditional modes this continued even into the 1980s a large traveling exhibition of contemporary makers from Japan the living National Treasures of Japan exhibition was held at the Art Institute in 1983 as one of its many stops and it featured no women at all highlighting the exclusionary nature of government sponsored living National Treasure designation process indeed the criteria for selecting a living National Treasure in Japan favors art artists who have been trained in traditional methods through an apprentice system that has largely been closed to women to this day no woman has been designated a living National Treasure in the field of Ceramics however women now as Jeffrey mentioned are in the majority at academic ceramic art programs they win prestigious Awards and commissions they have many solo shows and retrospectives and they are certainly no longer in the shadows in Japan there have actually been Decades of activity by women's ceramic artists the jordu to which translates to women's Association of ceramic art formed in 1957 and was spearheaded by subboy Asuka an artist included in this exhibition and that Association is still thriving today now in its 50 six exhibition and in the 1980s a group that came to be known as Cho Shojo Supergirls was creating uh large installation works that were garnering much attention this group included the artist tashima etco an artist who is also featured in radical clay and here I'm showing you an installation um from 19 1987 called hip Island uh she is currently professor of um ceramics at the Osaka University of the Arts a very prestigious position Japanese ceramics displayed in American museums and the avangard work then being made by Japanese ceramic artists many of them women could not have been further apart in the 1980s and I believe radical clay definitively brings these two worlds in step with one another unfortunately I can't talk about every one of the 36 amazing artists in the exhibition each one so worthy of their own exhibition but let me highlight just a few and along the way point out how each exemplifies certain characteristics threads that repeat and connect this group of artists and I'll also show you aspects of their work that you can't see in the exhibition in creating this show it was very important to have the artists speak for themselves so you'll notice that the labels are filled with quotes and today I have videos made by the artist to show you and at the end of the talk I'll mention some opportunities to hear from the artists themselves uh directly through our related exhibition programming so let's start with Mishima Kimo who Jeffrey mentioned who although is very unique in the way she entered the Ceramics field is one of the earliest and most successful to do so there's a wonderful essay by Hollis Goodall uh who just retired from the LA County uh Museum in the exhibition catalog that's devoted entirely to this artist mishima's work focuses on garbage the variety of things that have been thrown away by people in the most developed societies particularly newspapers or other items that have text here a larger than life garbage can filled with crumpled newspapers all ceramic stands in Japan's Center for contemporary art the island of naosima in the 19 wrong button in the 1960s she was affiliated with the gutai movement as was her husband a movement known to many of you that emphasized movement and process across media the Art Institute actually acquired this collage two-dimensional collage by her as part of its focus on gutai in 2017 before the current ceramic show was conceived there bits of newspaper in this mixed media work made in 1965 which is one link to her later work in Ceramics in the current exhibition we have two works by Mishima showcasing her signature method of silk screening text and images onto clay to create lifelike representations of trash a technique she began in 1971 uh again just marveling at the technique silk screening these Graphics including text readable text onto clay that alone is incredibly difficult uh her knowledge of silk screening but also how she has to prepare the clay to have the exact right uh amount of hardness um catching it at the right Point um in its drawing creating the slabs to receive the silk screen all of it is technically amazing She was drawn to the brittle nature of Ceramics to create her sculptures of transient trash the wated French newspaper I'm showing you on the left 1981 is readable it contains articles about the nuclear arms race among other things and it's like a diary of that particular day and time you have one sheet of newspaper that's added to the front and back of the clay slab it's the same sheet of the newspaper which is then shaped the larger work from 2007 is a smash cardboard box of beer with newspapers spilling out all the surfaces covered with text and information for years her work suffered from being uncategorizable is it Ceramics is it sculpture is she a Potter is she not a Potter um she says that only recently particularly since 2015 she uh that's when she started to have a steady income not before uh another artist oawa machko is also celebrated she's been active for decades she is an interesting contrast to Mishima since she and her work are categorizable being based on the celebrated Japanese practice wherein the Primacy of the material the clay is her starting point her works are sculpture though they often have a practical form at their origin and can look like vessels some more than others sometimes they're even titled as vessels as this one is this work in the exhibition exemplifies her recent work of creating handbuilt clam or basinlike forms out of giant ripped slabs of clay that have glaze poured on them to form what looks like a geological kind of sulfuric pool by contrast in art school she was trained on The Potter's Wheel she writes that of the 60 students who entered the craft division of Tokyo gayi which is the most prestigious Art Academy in Japan every year she was one of the few women but steadily after her more and more specialized in Ceramics while the men chose industrial design like many in her generation her career trajectory was marked by sacrifices for her family which shaped her career she joined her husband in France and then Africa for his work in the 1970s and in Burkina Faso she learned how to create clay molds and enjoyed the immediacy of searching for clay and firing Outdoors like many artists she also creates large uh room scale installations and here I'm showing you a work from 2019 you can see the pools of glaze and glass at the bottom of each cylindrical form she has many styles to her work however and here I'm showing you one of her red vessels inspired by the color of ancient terracotta pots she applies red iron oxide Blaze and rubs it into the clay surface directly so it appears as if the clay is red not as if it's covered in red glaze so you're not you don't just have Clay and then glaze that that covers it but it's how the glaze is applied and how the clay is worked that makes her work as well as the others uh so exceptional another major artist represented by two works in the exhibition is katsumata Cho her intensely colored large pumpkins evoke a life force and sensuousness but also danger especially uh in the case of the one with the yawning red tinged mouth this this interest in nature but also the gruesome side of it is something we'll see very much at play in the work of the younger generation of artists later on she studied and worked almost entirely in France in the 19 7s moving back to Japan towards the end of that decade when she was in her 50s her vegetal works are handbuilt using shigaraki clay and like many of the artists in this exhibition it is her Deft handling of materials and pioneering techniques that give them their singular appearance she applies her colors through a thin piece of cloth and the modeled soft looking surface is the result of many f irings sandings and layers of color her works are fascinating both in form color texture and concept I just love this really zoomed in detail where you can see that soft texture another artist whose work is very much about a kind of surface that only she can create is kisho in this work of 2017 we see her signature Sai sais zogan technique which is colored Stone inlay of her own invention which she uses on geometric forms geometric sculptural forms she's inspired by textiles and is in a way creating her own textile in clay actually one can go through the exhibition with textiles in mind and see how many different artists evoke cloth and textiles in their work before I show you a a short five five minute video of her process let me quote Joe Earl's description of her technique since he's done such a wonderful job of explaining it in the catalog she knads together more than a dozen multicolored Clays and uses them to build faceted Dynamic geometric forms that when cut reveal numerous hidden lines of contrasting Hues primarily pale blue while the body is still damp she states and digs into the surface of the clay with knives and needles making thousands of small holes that she fills with colored slip before spraying on a thin transparent glaze prior to firing so let's watch her do [Music] [Music] that [Music] than spe for this for for [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] for [Music] [Music] [Music] for [Music] great amazing uh I guess you need a lot of different kinds of Footwear to be a ceramic artist one of the most radical Creations I think in radical Clay is this work entitled Liberation by Kono tomoko she creates complex sculptures that look like oversized vegetation or in this case a plant creature that appears as if it's going to get up and walk away it sits on just a few points its leaves or feet and had to be assembled on site thankfully we had detailed instructions and very steady hands uh the marbleized clay a technique known as Nomi forms some of the complexity here uh as well as the stamman covered with small bits of multicolored Clays worked into a kind of Mosaic the tendrils are each hand formed and placed it would be understandable to say that her time in Bali where she worked for three years had an enormous impact on her um both the Flora and the colors this work was especially commissioned by the horites for the exhibition and we had thought that originally the title would be creature uh since she had named some of her works that before but to our surprise uh when we learned the title of this piece it was Liberation which was so curious so when I asked the artist about this she provided some explanation by saying that it referred to the freedom that she felt through its creation the artist plans to be here during the course of the exhibition so I'm going going to ask her about the title again and please stay tuned for some programming around her visit and I really hope that she'll do a demonstration uh workshop for us here are a few more examples of her work these are much smaller Works which are which are much more typical um of her I think this piece in radical Clay is is it the largest piece that she's yes the largest piece that she's ever created yet another artist who is trained abroad is hoso Hitomi her Works have established her among Global ceramic movements and in international exhibitions more than any other artist in the current exhibition she lives in London and finds her Botanical inspiration during her walks by meticulously shaping and grouping additions to a clay base she creates works that resemble a dense covering of leaves on a forest floor she began exploring molding techniques porcelain molding techniques while at Wedgewood and let's watch this short five minute video to see exactly how she does it nature is a very important part of my life I am interested in microbic detail of PL by looking very closely I found really beautiful details which I can use for my [Music] work my name is hoso I am a ceramic artist working in London I was looking at a massive Hors Tree in Britain it was really massive but have a tiny flowers I thought it's beautiful and this coexistence of a small delicate element and also big scale of the tree is wonderful I saw I wish to express this feeling with a PO and peace I really love to make something which is essentially from us when bag of cray arriving Studio it's lifeless but there is excitement going through process the cray start taking its shape and that is really exciting for me making something porel is frustrating if we don't know how to handle it porcelin is a very sensitive and delicate material and if I Lush the POS in my CL but once we get H it it could be very therapeutic every day sometimes could be repetitive but but it's like the therapeutic and meditative as I touch the material more memory comes back through hand and I remember in G prefecture in Japan there are lots of R fields and hot summer night thousand of frog singing and also the sound of rling R Le feel the air when I'm working in CL this beautiful sound I hear as if I was in Japan it might take one month to complete one spr model afterwards I made negative mold then I put the poing clay inside of the mold make thousand leaves from it and then carve finer detail with modified dentist tools I get a strong piece from as wheel then I apply these leaves on the shape almost looks like the leaves obscuring the branches then I dry uh very slowly sometimes takes six s months and then some of the vessels uh I give inside with fine gold leaf then it's finished sometimes whole process take one year and a half this needed patience so I made this quietly at the studio basically this pce audience was only me for 2 years but now the peace could be seen by a lot of people in T I feel really grateful and excited we Japanese have this phrase s s means Spirit Yu means home I believe each plant each tree flowers have a s almost like us they can think they can feel so when I'm making the POS and piece inspired by Nature I feel this Spirit saying exist in my peace so this way I also have this respect the peace that's the um attitude I have to the [Music] nature all right so one of the younger artists in the exhibition is also one of the most conceptual playing with traditional subject matter her clay sculpture is often entitled bag work appear to be brightly colored textiles wrapped around vessels or boxes which point to the centuries old practice uh in Japan of wrapping treasured items usually Ceramics themselves or t- bows in cloth uh Tanaka creates the illusion of fabric by using sponges to smooth her coil built forms applying clay slip with a brush or airbrush and adding up to several layers of glaze uh I've gotten asked the question oh does she use a mold to create these shapes NOP entirely handbuilt the beauty of the forms the soft looking folds within which the color is more saturated is incredibly beautiful up close but I also love how the sculpture is representational of objects that are not clay and bringing with it is this notion of a precious or concealed treasure and with that I think we've come kind of full circle from the garbage sculptures of Mishima kimio to an artist of the younger generation also creating Works in clay that defy the appearance of the medium but I can't close without showing you the work of the youngest artist in the exhibition that Graces the exhibition catalog cover this is Shuda by Yamaguchi Mio during the photo shoot for the catalog this year this work so impressed us with its texture and color that we decided to feature it on the cover of the catalog it looks like scales on some underwater rock formation and the pale blue glaze covers the clay inconsistently like slime or Moss um it's just beautiful discussing this work Yamaguchi explains that sha is a Buddhist deity in Japanese the word is used to express intense emotions when I created this piece I had big strong emotions I wo those emotions into the clay it's certainly one of the highlights of the exhibition for me but I think I've probably said that about a lot of the pieces that I showed there are lot of highlights so I am absolutely thrilled that Yamaguchi and hoso kitomi will be joining us in person for a panel discussion with myself and Joe Earl the catalog editor on March 23d next year and I hope you can join us for what promises to be a very interesting discussion each creation is so spectacular each artist's process and style is so their own that I encourage you to visit the exhibition more than once over its six-month run as well as join us for the programming to hear from the artists directly and um I would be happy to take questions and ask that Jeffrey horvit join me on stage in case there's any questions that he's better able to answer for you and uh please raise your hand and staff will bring a microphone to you if you have a question feel free to ask any your questions about any aspect of this or the background of it or the collecting whatever you like if I don't know the answer I'll just make it up me too no takers no we got one over there she's waiting for her mic hello hi I was able to see this exhibition this morning and one of my first well one of the um overwhelming questions that I had was many all of these pieces are large and very seemingly delicate could one of you speak to the transport process of these incredible pieces the transport the shipping they're so delicate how many of you have nightmares the uh this is actually one of the huge challenges of doing these exhibitions and then moving them around many of the works are fragile uh Co had uh really done a number on the major art shipping companies that let go a lot of their most experienced staff and only now where they're sort of restaffing adequately it's very hard to pack these in Japan the packing is an art form itself it's quite expensive to do but each time you take something out it can be a problem one of the one of the main problems in is actually not the shipping itself it's taking it out of the crate and it's particularly sensitive for artists that use a very very low firing where the the tensil strength of the clay is really not very high and that's fairly common now with some of the major artist a a male and a female sigora who's probably the leading figure making um plant-like sculptures uh but also also um you'll see the plant forms too where especially when there's two types of clay in it then you really have a problem because part of it is very strong part of it is actually quite weak and then there's other types where you think it's weak but it's not weak one of my functions in the house as I reinstall our 1500 ft of gallery so I'm really familiar with this I don't think I've broken much although once I did Chip something thank you yes um you we have a whole department of of registrars who were uh very involved um along with the uh shippers and and the the warehouse that the pieces came from in um making sure that the the packing was adequate the show is going to travel uh to other venues and so we're creating um packing and crates so that the pieces will be safe as they as they go um around the country and um and hopefully come back uh just as just as pristine as when they left is there any other questions I think there's one in the middle over there hey Jeff and Carol thank you so much for the artwork and uh how did you become uh so interested in specifically Ceramics from Japan it seems like such a niche to me think that's for you how did you become interested in Ceramics from Japan so uh the story I've actually told people often Carol has this first of all sheep likes threedimensional things and what you probably don't know about is the other collection the French collection which is primarily paintings and drawings which are two-dimensional uh you'll actually see some of it here next fall with a show of French art from 1770 to 1830 which is actually even larger than the Japanese collection but basically what she does is she finds something of interest uh particularly Asian art which she loves and then she'll buy me a present and it's a bit like fishing where if the fish don't bite the first lore try a different lore so um I was actually de accessioning by half gift and half sale of my former Italian drawing old Master drawing collection and so she bought me a present this was January 2008 it couldn't have been 2 weeks later that we are having lunch with Joan mous or the preeminent dealer in New York and she's showing me Japanese contemporary Ceramics so we we ended up having lunch and with Joan and setting out a collection policy and sort of a strategic simplified vision of what to do I've been an art dealer in my uh misspent youth I've been a museum trustee actually the Boston MFA a dealer in 20th century and contemporary Western uh European and American art so I sorted know most of the parts and I said if we're going to do this let's do it seriously I didn't mean this seriously and one thing led to another and it's it's actually one of the great bargains in the art world one of the few Bargains in the art world for what you get there's almost nothing that is such good value so uh the other way to think of it is I explained at a talk decades ago at Harvard uh having to do with the drawing collection it's like going to the pet store buying two jales and forgetting to ask what the sex is next thing you have four Geral then you have eight Geral then you have 16 Geral but then we started to see the grander purpose and our purpose is to expose really the the greatest cluster of uh modern contemporary ceramic art in the world to a much broader audience and that audience uh Carol thinks has it it's certainly broached 500,000 people probably across 30 to 40 museums that have not seen this material everyone who sees it even if you know absolutely nothing about it you're just taken by it and so the collection is not just a normal collecting activity it's pathological but it is a collecting activity for a purpose and I've talked about Carol is being the Johnny apple seed of Japanese ceramics in America well I've never thought of Ceramics like Geral but now I will thank you uh if there are oh there's one there's one more question I see in the back and this will be our last question of the afternoon are these artists well accepted and received in Japan itself especially them being women mhm do you want to answer that are these artists accepted in Japan what being are they accepted in Japan as uh being being women it's getting better uh it it Japan act it's a very strange market and it's not it's it's not strange to them of course but it's still very much a traditional Market but also constrained by scale the homes are actually quite small and there are many ceramic museums but in terms of the women themselves it's ramping up so rapidly and yet this type of exhibition this will go a long way because the Japanese Market often looks to the US and Europe but even more to the US for validation so some of the artists involved in this we thought were well we know they're great Fuji Casa being one of them tanaku another so we've helped them by establishing a resume very very fast by buying a lot of work a lot as relative term and having it in museums that helps validate their CV that gives them credibility in Japan and this exhibition is going to go a very long way toward that purpose I absolutely agree um this is the case with contemporary artists uh in Japan male or female in uh different media whether it's Ceramics bamboo metal work that once they have a major presence in the US um through an exhibition or an acquisition it's easier for them to gain acceptance um back home yeah so thank you all for your questions and Carolyn Jeffrey have generously agreed to spend some time now in the exhibition if you have any further questions so we can all move over there thank you so much for coming out [Applause] [Music] [Applause] today

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Length: 58min 14sec (3494 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 16 2024