CONCEPT
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About My Work I
first began making contemporary ceramic art in 1958 when I became a student
at the Kyoto School of Craft. This was soon after the pioneers of
contemporary Japanese ceramic art Yagi Kazuo, Suzuki Osamu, Yamada Hikaru and
others had formed the avant-garde group Sodeisha. Yagi and Suzuki would
sometimes come to the Kyoto School of Craft to give instruction in sketching
and hand-building, and they provided me with the impetus to begin creating my
own objet. At
the time, my teachers strongly impressed on me the importance of creating
unique, individual work that is not a copy of someone else, even if first
attempts may turn out to be amateurish. Today, almost 50 years later, this
idea is still one of the most important elements of my work. In
1967, I joined Sodeisha as a member, and continued to exhibit my work in
conjunction with the activities of Sodeisha. Later, I traveled a number of
times to America and Eurpoe. In Europe, I studied Christian art and
architecture, and visited many museums to study art from impressionist to
cubist. In America I experienced first hand the lively contemporary art scene
at the time, especially trends that had come from Europe as Dadaism and
evolved in America into pop art and minimalist. At the time, I was particularly
interested in the minimalists such as Donald Judd. In
my work, I do not consistently use a single technical style. I have adapted a
variety of formative and firing techniques and incorporated new methods of
production according to evolving expressive ideas and images. A major turning
point in my work came about in the late 1970s as a result of my interest in
the relationship between Zen thought and the aesthetics of Sen Rikyu. I
discovered a common ground between Rikyu’s wabi (simplicity) and sabi (taste – discovery) and the world of American minimalist art that
fascinated me. Another
turning point for me was when I met Isamu Noguchi, at the time one of the
world’s top sculptors. Noguchi taught me about the
emotional aspects of the Japanese identity. Around
this time, I began developing my series of large screens, houses where people
live and graves that hold deceased people, and forms derived from images of
tomb shapes. My
work in the 2006 Clayarch Gimhae Museum’s
International Invitational Exhibition is an attempt to explore the degree to
which primitive images of the Japanese Jomon and Yayoi eras can be expressed
in a simple, stoic space. 2005 Sasayama Tadayasu
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