Sometimes crusty and uneven as a horned toad’s skin, sometimes squat as a toadstool, sometimes misshapen and irregular as potholes on a city street, the MFA’s "Contemporary Clay: Japanese Ceramics for the New Century" is nevertheless pervaded by an air of monumental dignity. Commingled with the craggy vases and the platters that resemble slabs of roughly painted rock are their opposites: porcelain boxes so delicate and refined, they seem fit to hold only vapor; nesting bowls that begin as elegant troughs and then reduce in size to tea bowls, the smallest being no bigger than a fruit fly. Between those extremes of apparently random, found, natural forms and the meticulously hand-hewn is where most of the ceramic artists in "Contemporary Clay" weigh in. No matter what its style, each work is marked by a reverence for tradition and artistry that also allows for idiosyncratic expression.
A case in point is Kaneshige Kôsuke, the third son of a National Living Treasure of Japan, Kaneshige Toyo (also a ceramic artist and one credited for reinventing one of the two ceramic styles indigenous to Japan), whose contribution resembles a throw blanket. Saint’s Garments looks like a thick brown shawl that’s been carefully but not compulsively folded over a low-slung riser, two parts earth and one part garment. Its solidity is undeniable, but so too is its suggestion of an interior with the potential to stretch itself out, the way a chambered nautilus implies an inner surface that exceeds its outermost shell.
Far more orchestrated but still evoking the pliancy of fabric — in this case rope — is Sakiyama Takayuki’s thick, striated, light-brown 2004 vessel Listening to the Waves. Imagine a two-foot-tall ball of twine that’s been reshaped and ossified. That the work also can function as a vessel is almost beside the point; a non-hollow interior would make little difference to the appeal of its undulating form, that of a hefty stoneware basket that swells from a thick, circular base, opening to an elliptical aperture at its summit.
The natural world’s own forms pose the greatest challenge to artists working in clay. Whether to renounce, refine, or replicate what you see in nature is the question. Koike Shôko draws directly and brilliantly on natural formations, in her case marine life. Her 1999 Shell Vessel could have been lifted from a Caribbean coral reef. Closer in appearance to rock than to shell, the 12x9 vessel presents a series of wavy, irregularly edged but regularly paced crenellations — each hardened wave looks like a mature tree-ear mushroom — that swirl in unison and taper from a wide upper region to a sudden, relatively narrow base. For all its mass and stasis and hardness, were you to come upon Shôko’s vessel while scuba diving, you wouldn’t be surprised to see it awkwardly swim away — its surface both expresses and camouflages its dynamism.
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