Contemporary Japanese Ceramics from the Collection of Gordon Brodfuehrer

Ceramics have been made in Japan for 12,000 years. It's part of the collective unconscious of the Japanese people, that 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 Bizen ware. Bizen ware has been a staple of utilitarian ceramics for 1,000 years. There are now young potters who have taken it a step further and do some works which are utilitarian, but are quite beautiful. This is a vase by a young potter named Yamashita Joji. Now, the usual characteristic of Bizen ware is the ash glaze. The only glaze you find on the object is from the red pine ash, which is in the kiln for 10 to 20 days. Huge amounts of pine wood. The ash is heated to the point where it descends in a liquid form and becomes a glaze. Looking at this, you'll say, where is the ash glaze? There is no ash glaze on 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 Bizen area. They used to put wet seaweed or straw in between the pieces so they would not stick together 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 hidesuke, which refers to the cord that Japanese women use to hold back the sleeve of their kimono when they are working. And you'll see this has a wonderful 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 Bizen. Naoki 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 Yellin in 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 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 an elegance and a certain mystery by having the mouth of the vase disappear. Shigaraki is just outside of Kyoto. It's been a potting center again for a thousand or more years. This is very much like 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 an incredible contradiction. This looks so fragile, but at 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 Buddhist thought, you'll remember that those things are not important because they're happening all the time at the same time, becoming and 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 of these pieces with photographs because I'm of the firm opinion that Japanese ceramics strongly reflect Japanese nature. Taijiro Ito is a dealer in Tokyo, but he's also an avid nature photographer. And fortunately, he has archives going back 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 a tranquil, dark green pool with a variety of nature happening 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 visiting Taijiro and he took me and a friend out to the Kiboto Museum at the foot of Mount Fuji. And he wanted to go up to the fifth station, which is as far as you can drive and see this 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 shigaraki ware. 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 concretions of glaze called Eye of the Dragonfly, which are highly prized by Japanese potters. But you can think of wind on Mount Fuji, but also can think of wind and the incredible energy within the kiln. Shigaraki's characteristics are very rough clay with a white feldspar stone in it. You see here something called a kakehana, a wall vase, which are very common. At the top, you'll see the ash glaze. At the bottom, you'll see more of the clay itself. And below that, we have a chawan, 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 amazing piece of art. It's a mitsuzashi, 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 hearkens 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 the 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, almost lacquer color. And sometimes they put them on strings around their doors. This tray is another piece of Bizan ware. My dealer Robert Yellen was driving me through Bizan and meeting some potters. And as we're coming towards Okiyama City to Inland Sea, 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 in Bizan 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, the hiratsuki. You see those two lines coming down like wispy clouds going across the sun. Wakimoto Hiroyuki is a very, very famous potter in Bizan. But curiously enough, he and the other most famous potter did not come from there. They both came from an island off the shore of Kyushu to the west. The other potter is named Kakunazaki Ryuichi, who is, well, a rock star. I think that's what people call him 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 Ajiki Hiro, and I think the people at Domingue were absolutely inspired by putting these two pieces together because this kind of primitive, almost prehistoric anthropomorphic figure is juxtaposed with this brutalized nature. Now, over the hills from Shigaraki is an area called Iga. Iga was most famous for being the foundry, the university, the ninja, the professional assassins who came in the night all dressed in black and no one saw them coming or going, but they left death and destruction behind. When the emperor was reinstalled to the Meiji restoration, the ninja were suppressed. And I think Iga was tainted by that association. But one potter named Shuhei Fujioka devoted his life to resurrecting the reputation of Iga ware. 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 designs that are so compelling, you might forgive my lack of good manners. There was just a piece of filet mignon with a sprinkle of fresh tarragon on top and it was stunning. Food and ceramics are very, very important in Japan. Mr. Hasu 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 some 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 Iga ware, the scorching at the bottom, the clay and the ash glaze, which is so incredibly controlled here. They're 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 that in Japan, objects acquire more respect, more value, more reverence from being used. You would now 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 ginomi, these sake vessels are for all the world, like some of the more exotic fruits you see at Whole Foods. We used to only see them in markets in Thailand. A tokuri and two niga-style ginomi 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 sake 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 Tanba. Tanba, for a thousand years, has made large sake 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 ginomi by a famous artist named Ryoji Koie, 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 Shino. Shino is practiced all over Japan. It's not from one area. Ken Matsuzaki lives up in the Northeast. His kiln was destroyed in the earthquake, but Bernie and Sue Pucker of the Pucker Gallery in Boston, who represent him, raised money to rebuild his kiln and he's now producing these beautiful, beautiful things again. This is from Hagi ware. This deep blue glaze is one of the glazes you'll find in Hagi. These two ginomi are all about design. The clay is not important here because these are examples of Kiyo ware 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 Shino ware. 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 thaw 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 a Shino 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. Odobe is one of those styles which is not related to a certain place, came into being in the great Momoyama period of when the tea ceremony became so important. There was a tea master named Odobe and this glaze is named after him. This particular potter does not make functional pieces. This is the only purely 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 an extraordinary technique, which he's devised. It must be incredibly arduous, which truly fascinates potters when they come to see it. This dark green is what you usually think of as Odobe glaze, but it has other colors as well, which we'll see. Shingo Takeuchi is someone also who does zogan, this inlaying 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 ginomi by a young man who went to university to study philosophy and thought he'd take a ceramic course 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 ginomi is called inbe shino, meaning on fire shino. 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 Odobe ware, Odobe ware 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 or Kyoto. And this potter 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 Fuji-san. This potter was a student of Kakuzaki Yuichi. Takahiro Ishii is one of my favorite potters. I think he has wonderful elegance but strength also in his work. Two kinds of vessels for pouring sake. One is the tokuri, which is a little flask or this kind of pitcher called a katakuchi. And this is made by a young Japanese American potter who lives north of Seattle. Now we come to the word tradition. Some of these traditions go back many, many generations, 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 Tsujimura. He and his wife had studied painting and after the war, there was no economy in Japan. The place was just 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 would have 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 and extremely famous potter all over the world. There's an exhibition in New York City of his work and a New York Times critic approached it not as ceramic but as landscape painting. He has two sons who are potters. This large tsubo, this roundish vessel is by Kai Tsujimura and you see an example of the wonderful things, the energy in the kiln where the ash glaze sweeps across this beautiful, vibrant clay. His other son, Yui, designed this large vessel which I saw at Ippudo Gallery in New York City and Shoko, the proprietor, had a wooden ladle on that so it looked like one of those wonderful bowls you use 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 ware is very ancient in Japan and had been kind of neglected from the 5th century AD. Sueki ware 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 clamshells 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 Tsubo by Yui Tsujimura 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 on the wall is by Shiro Tsujimura, 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 mitsuzashi of hagiware, Yamanese seigan. 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 its just over-the-top Baroque flow of glaze which has essentially become almost glass. This style of hagiware is called the devil's brain, always squirming and never at rest, evidently. If you see an E in a hyphen before any of these styles, it means that something has been painted on them, something is representational. And you see here some simple grasses or fences, very, very subtle references but that's a Shino. A piece of hagiware, 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 a cabbage leaf masquerading as a tea bowl, again by Mr. Ishii, one of my favorite potters. Another great hagi ceramicist, Hosai Udagawa, also died far too early. And this is a piece which astonished some of the dealers. They'd never seen anything quite this large by him, is a mountainscape and almost miraculously, Taijiro had this photograph which I think spoke to it so beautifully. And you wonder why is the potter making a mountainscape? 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. And when that happened, many of the court painters and poets, the so-called literati, who the Manchu were trying to co-opt and make part of their administration, left the capital, went out into nature, went to the bamboo groves, went to the mountain grottoes, drank plum wine, painted, composed poetry, and became 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 huggy wear. Many, many, many generations, the Miuwa family. You see this 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 Oribe wear. 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 baffle potters 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 Minge Museum here indulged me by installing it in this rather strange position because, for me, it looks like a bamboo grove. Taijiro did not have a picture of a bamboo grove he liked enough, so he got in his car and he went to Kamakura, to 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 Oribe wear. These two pieces on the left, the tall vase form and the tray, were produced by Kato Yasukage, the 14th. He had taken the family name and very, very promising talent. One of the great young potters 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 then continue the tradition there. In the back, you see a kind of a jar, a vase or a jar form, which is kind of the fusion of Shino and Oribe by Ken Matsuzaki. And this is a tall lidded 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 minerals. That's a beautiful piece by a potter whose works are very hard to find. They have openings of his works and before the doors are opened, they're all sold. If you go as far West as you can go in Japan, to 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 lived there with multi-generations and had a profound influence on Japanese ceramics. This kind of glaze effect is called Chosen Karatsu, which refers to this glaze. And in this case, I had seen this photograph by Taijiro when he went to Karatsu. And then I found this wonderful tray form in a gallery in Kyoto, Utsuwakan, 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 was so rare and so difficult to form. This particular master of Celadon, Saeko 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 by way of the crackling. And so I just thought of that lichen-covered stone where the lichen superimposes itself on other lichen and it builds and builds and builds. When Taijiro 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, this kind of bat, which is a homophone for wealth, as well as bat in Chinese. Again, some design elements are celebrated in Japan, which originally came from China. I had mentioned Tanba Ware 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 to 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 in Santa Fe, has done some very, very elegant restrained pieces. This kind of bow tie-looking thing would be perfect with this one blossom, and that kind of leaning vase form, which sometimes I think jokingly looks like a Klaus Oldenburg cigarette stub. It's also beautiful with flowers leaning forward, and a little tray for just serving some tea sweets. This is another wonderful potter who lives in Tanba, but really does things very much in his own style. He's a great favorite of Robert Yellen, Kato Katsumi. 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 Taijiro did not have a picture of a fiddlehead fern, but he raced down either to the florist or the drugstore, and he found this one, which I think is absolute elegant masterpiece. It looks like lacquerware. 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. Yukio Izumita was a salaryman. That's one of the people you see on the trains in their dark suit and their polished 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 Iwate Province up in the northeast and got some land. He did take some instruction from some potters, but his work is what I call sui generis, have his own inspiration. This is also a piece which confounds potters. 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 irreverent gentleman referred to it as a radiator, but that's all right. You see what you see. Taijiro does not have a picture of what happens inside the earth, and what happens inside the earth is of vital interest to this potter, and that should not be too surprising to us in this country. Japan has suffered so much from seismic events, from earthquakes, that what happens beneath the earth's crust is of 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 Taijiro 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 Izumita 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 itself, 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 potter, I think, in the world. Tokonome 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 Yohei 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 made into coils to form this larger piece. This is called First Snow of Spring, and there's a wonderful photograph which reacquaints us 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 wintertime again. The potter has taken his thumb or other finger, I'm not sure which, and 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 Bizen ware. This very strange form by Kakuzaki Ryuichi underlines my earlier statement that when they came to Bizen, 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 goma, 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 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-shaped 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 potter, a great celadon potter who manages to create these planes of different colors of celadon, 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 multi-panel folding screen that hadn't been properly folded back together again. Really quite a dramatic and beautiful piece, a great favorite of many people. This last piece is by a woman potter, very, very creative, has a wonderful kind of imaginative spirit, and this is called Kagon Falls. Many of her pieces depict waterfalls or some similar natural phenomena. Kagon Falls is a waterfall up above Nikko, 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 coexist 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.