Radical Clay – Art & Antiques Magazine

Into the Spotlight: Contemporary Japanese Women Ceramists

By Lilly Wei

Clay, like many materials formerly relegated to the less acclaimed echelons of craft, at least in the United States, has risen in esteem of late, as have other so-called minor arts. There are more exhibitions dedicated to it, and clay appears more often as part of the repertoire of multidisciplinary artists in the wake of increasing aesthetic diversification and hybridization. Clay has its own storied history and other cultures have long prized it, particularly in Asia where rare porcelains can command upwards of eight figures, as one tangible index of worth. In Japan, ceramic works have been designated National Treasures, another measure of the esteem in which they are held. As might be expected, however, until recently, any ceramist considered of serious weight was male. “Radical Clay: Contemporary Women Artists from Japan,” on view at the Art Institute of Chicago from December 16, 2023 until June 3, 2024, persuasively argues the flip side of that story, featuring 36 outstanding Japanese ceramists representing several generations of women, the works from the collection of Carol and Jeffrey Horvitz.

Joe Earle, an expert on contemporary Japanese art, in one of the essays in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition for which he was the editor, traced the trajectory of women ceramists in Japan from the 19th-century Buddhist nun Otagaki Rengetsu to early modernists Suwa Sozan II to Ono Hakuko, to the increasing number of women practitioners entering the field since the 1950s and 1960s.  Studio ceramics flourished as they did so, in what seems to be an intertwined development. Japan boasts the greatest number of clay artists in the world whose art, not so incidentally, can sustain them, although women artists still struggle with the same problems that beleaguer women everywhere in balancing the demands of traditional female roles with those of careers, especially in more patriarchal societies, despite ostensible progress. Five decades or so ago, there were very few women in a field they now dominate. Among the reasons that they have been embraced might be their eagerness to innovate, untrammeled by the restrictions of a tradition that had excluded them and spurred by a willingness to play with the medium and push its boundaries, including scaling up to the dimensions of sculpture. And why shouldn’t studio ceramics be viewed—and assessed—as sculpture, as a three-dimensional art form?

Many of these ceramists have studied and lived abroad (as Erle points out, Japanese women artists who are successful still often reside outside of Japan), absorbing new ideas and inventive techniques that have made their practice more current, more appealing to contemporary audiences. These artists are largely unfamiliar to American audiences, a continuing lack of recognition of the medium that, with a few exceptions, is not limited to Japanese ceramists, but that, too, is changing. In “Radical Clay,” the majority of the stoneware and porcelain works are abstract, but they run the gamut from the purely geometric and expressive to forms that imply the botanical as well as the human body, both as intimations and as replications of nature. They also vary in appearance and mood, from the austere to the sumptuous, the highly refined to the playful and comical, the beautiful and the grotesque.

Tanaka Yu, Fukuromono (Bag Work), 2018, glazed shigaraki stoneware, 24 1⁄2 × 21 1⁄2 × 14 1⁄2 in.
All works from the Carol & Jeffrey Horvitz Collection of Contemporary Japanese Ceramics.

One of the great pleasures to be found in contemplating these objects is the sheer range of forms, imagery, and the even more remarkable array of textures; the surfaces in some instances are so alive they all but dance. They might assume the delicacy of plants or the enlaced filagree of pine trees. Some are rivetingly surrealistic, one a mix of fish, florals, butterflies, a human ear, open mouth, and a hand. Other works appear as if made from textiles of all kinds from the slippery to the rough. Still others look as if confected of spun sugar, or billows of mouthwatering meringue. The tactility of many of the works tempts you to touch them (but don’t), mimicking the gnarly bark of wood, the crumple of paper, the grittiness of soil, and much more, some of such astonishing intricacy and fragility that it is surprising that they haven’t splintered in the kiln, the invention and technical prowess of the artists impressive.

Mishima Kimiyo (b. 1932), at 91, the oldest contributor in the show, is one of its most widely shown and revered, if also its quirkiest artist. Considered a sculptor and installation artist whose medium is clay, she lived through the traumatic bombings of World War II and its ruins, her artistic talent evident from the time she was 12 years old. A leading advocate of non-traditional ceramics, her work mimics the trash she collects to recycle, slyly calling her presciently environmentally sensitive work “garbage” to underscore her independence. She sometimes enlarges her objects from their original size, such as the 2007 work that replicates a carton used to carry Asahi beer that is crushed and stuffed with newspapers. Their text, in English and Japanese, is screen-printed onto the clay, the disposability of the objects paired with the accidental and intentional cracks in the ceramic that reinforce the work’s own vulnerability. It’s a trompe l’oeil of image and material, a double feint that fools the viewer into thinking it is an actual discard, and that it is made of paper and cardboard, not clay, Cinderella-ed from junk into art.

Koike Shōko (b. 1943) frequently depicts nature in her work, the first Japanese female ceramic artist of the post-war period to do so, and the first woman to graduate from the program in ceramics from Tokyo University of the Arts in 1962.  She is internationally known for her hand-sculpted, labor-intensive shell vessels, but her ceramics might also recall the roll of ocean waves or the stratification of cliffs near the sea. Each work is created slowly; it can take up to six months to complete a single piece, her shell ribbing made by applying layer after layer of grainy (Shigaraki) clay followed by coats of milky white and ferrous glazes that she incises to create its complex, textured and creviced surfaces as seen in Kai no katachi (Shell Form), 1995. Her mother was a prominent fashion designer in the western style, giving her the idea that she could shape clay in a similar manner, creating the ridges for her shells “by making pleats or darts like clothing,” she said.

Mishima Kimiyo, Untitled, 2007, stoneware, 9 × 20 × 22 in.
All works from the Carol & Jeffrey Horvitz Collection of Contemporary Japanese Ceramics.

Ogawa Machiko (b. 1946) was raised in Hokkaido in a family of artists; her early training took place in France (Paris) and Burkina Faso. She also claims nature as her source, although from a more panoramic, geologic vantage point. Akai utsuwa (Red Vessel), 2021, is an eye-catching, intense red evoking crusted layers of baked volcanic earth or an excavated artifact that has been cracked, the outer two casings split open to reveal its core. Another work is white, irregularly shaped, wavering between a handmade and found object, the limpid blue glaze that drips down one side like water appears to be still wet and is its most arresting feature.

Shinshō o tsumu (Compilation of Recollected Images), 2017, is by Kishi Eiko (b. 1948), whose signature technique is the use of colored stone inlay (saiseki zōgan), a method she pioneered. Kneading together more than a dozen multicolored clays, she overlays her severe geometric forms in a manner that, when cut, reveals their many hues. Here, the surface of its polygonal shape is crossed by slightly raised triangles and thin bands that are aligned like an unfolding fan. Her works can suggest fabric, such as the stiff brocade robes threaded with gold of Nō drama and are a nod to Kyoto’s famed textile industries.

Aoki Katsuyo (b. 1972), who originally studied painting, soon switched to ceramics. Her work is unapologetically decorative, but with an undertow of melancholy, as if all that teeming fecundity, that bursting of life, will disappear, will decay and die—an echo of the pervasive theme of mono-no-aware (loosely translated as the pathos of transience), as in Loom II, 2014 made of glazed porcelain. It is a tour de force technically, characterized by an ornamental impulse and fragility that are as exquisite as they are extravagant. Who knew that clay could be made to do that?

Ogawa Machiko, Red Vessel, 2021; glazed stoneware, reduction-fired stoneware; 16 3⁄4 x 14 1⁄2 in.
All works from the Carol & Jeffrey Horvitz Collection of Contemporary Japanese Ceramics.

The youngest of the group is Tanaka Yū (b. 1989).  She is another artist who playfully, charmingly teases the eye, transforming the brittle, unyielding clay into what appears to be the softness of cloth. Her most sought-after series are her fukuromono (bag pieces), this one from 2018 with its swooping folds and cunning knot, and tsutsumimono (wrapped pieces), referring to the venerable Japanese custom of using furoshiki, cloths used to bundle possessions together for transport (a laudable custom we might emulate to reduce waste). She is also a gifted colorist, her distinctive goldenrod yellow glaze particularly admired.

“Radical Clay” is an overdue salute to Japanese women ceramists (and women ceramists in general) whom Janice Katz, the associate curator of Japanese art at the Art Institute of Chicago and the exhibition’s lead organizer, credited with making some of the most innovative contributions to the medium in the past several decades. One reason given for their more imaginative output, both stylistically and technically, is because they were not welcomed in traditional studios, therefore not burdened by retardataire conventions. By working “not through but around the systems,” Katz explained, they have “elevated Japanese ceramics into a contemporary art form of great relevance.”