Masamichi Yoshikawa’s lavish ceramic palaces
Beauty is known to elude universal objective definition and the concept is thus frequently used in an inflationary way. Yet no other word so fittingly describes the sublimeness and harmony exuded by Japanese artist Masamichi Yoshikawa’s porcelain sculptures, characteristics that arise from the harmonious interplay of form and surface. The artist creates spaces out of porcelain panels that interlock and penetrate one another in different ways. Thin walls merge with thick cuboids, bars slide in-between. The volumes are uneven, asymmetrical, and feature deep incisions. Each piece of the LUXURIANT POTTERY PALACES bears traces of the artist’s fingers, indicating how he hand-makes these objects with true intensity. The seihakuji glaze perfects their consummate beauty: It envelops the pieces like a melting glacier and in doing so gives them a transcendental character. The works exude a spiritual presence. The artist reinterprets Japanese cultural traditions in an entirely new way.
Yoshikawa is among the most important ceramicists in Japan. He has long since made history with his porcelain art. Born in Chigasaki in 1946, he studied Industrial Design at the Tokyo Design Academy before discovering ceramics. He then based his life in Tokoname, a historical ceramics center that, along with Seto, Echizen, Shigaraki, Bizen, and Kandacho Kui, is one of the “Six Ancient Kilns” of Japan. In this place steeped in centuries of producing ceramics, Yoshikawa devoted himself to immaculate white porcelain and its spiritual properties. White stands in contrast to the red clay used mainly to produce the vessels for the tea ceremony. His intensive exploration of porcelain and its properties led Yoshikawa to radically turn his back on function. The freedom of the individual shapes takes center stage in his objects, which take their cue from built architecture. Yoshikawa allows them to enter into the most diverse of relationships, delicate and detailed, or block-like and sturdy. He leaves it to the viewer to find the idea of a habitat, that conveys far more than just visible material, in this structural dichotomy.
Alongside his artistic ceramic works, Yoshikawa also creates ceramic vessels. He pours seihakuji glaze over the hand-formed porcelain. He makes this process, which is so important to the composition, visible by in part leaving the “biscuit”, the fired but unpainted clay, visible in some places on the lower outside walls of the teabowls. The glaze hardens suddenly. Glaze drips also remain visible, allowing us to experience just how precious and profound is the light blue-green glaze. The artist’s great mastery in handling this glaze can also be seen in the vessels with painted and scratched decorations. With delicate, cobalt-blue strokes he draws geometric patterns and sketches: The seihakuji glaze then transforms these into cyphers that seemingly emerge from within the material itself. Mysteries from deeper layers can then be discerned on the surface. Time is another dimension that the artist inscribes in his works.
The exhibition of Masamichi Yoshikawa’s work at Galerie Friedrich Müller, Japan Art, will feature the latest pieces by the world-renowned artist.
Doris Weilandt
