INNOVATIVE CERAMIC ARTIST

No. 01

How ceramics taught me who I am

From a young age, I struggled with the fact that I had no real dream. While friends spoke of who they wanted to become, I carried a quiet emptiness — a sense that I might never become anyone in particular. At twenty-five, on a trip, I joined a casual ceramic workshop. The moment I touched clay, something in me settled — "this is it." I bought a sketchbook and a pen, and hitchhiked to Gifu. There, I heard the saying: "Ceramic artists hit a wall after five years." The struggle to sell, the production challenges that come after success, the exhaustion that erodes creativity. Even so, I wanted to try — to find a place where I could live fully through this material, and bring something new into the world.

No. 02

In Gifu, on the soil of Mino-yaki

Toki, my home in Gifu, produces more ceramics than anywhere in Japan. Mino-yaki has nurtured the largest number of Living National Treasures, with craftsmen and factories preserving tradition together. But the region is in crisis — pressured by cheap mass-production, losing techniques as successors disappear, and facing depletion of the very clay that defines it (some estimates give it ten years). Without action, the Mino-yaki I fell for could be lost. I believe the path forward lies in continuing to take risks while honoring what tradition has built.

No. 03

"Formulation" — the core of my practice

Through ceramics, the word "formulation" became my identity. Glaze formulation means combining materials in 0.001-gram increments and adjusting firing programs by 1°C — painstaking work. But precision alone never reaches the real beauty of a glaze. What matters more is repetition without fear of failure, and the genuine surprises that emerge only from a large volume of trials. Self-taught, I have grown through trial and error. The transformation still moves me: a powdery, monochrome surface goes into the kiln and comes out alive with color. Sometimes a result exceeds anything I had imagined, and that surprise is what keeps me at this work. I think of ceramics as things shaped by human hands attempting to control nature and never fully succeeding — and it is that margin of chance that holds both the maker and the user.

No. 04

HINOMIYA and G-E-N — two challenges

In 2022, I launched HINOMIYA — a form of Mino ware that connects artist and industry. The idea: to re-examine mass-production techniques from an artist's viewpoint and reinterpret them as methods of design. Working with craftsmen and factories, joining traditional skill to a contemporary sensibility, HINOMIYA turns production techniques into considered design and finds fresh possibilities in Mino ware. In 2023 came G-E-N, a project connecting artists and industry to bring new value to the region. Its themes: "the origin and root of things," "the individual parts that make up a whole," "the act of creation." A hybrid brand in which Mino ware's mass-production techniques are combined with each artist's identity, where function and expression meet. G-E-N adds an artist's decoration to the bisque bodies long used in Mino ware — function and aesthetics side by side. Together, HINOMIYA and G-E-N stand for the value created when artists and industry work together.

No. 05

Ceramics, connecting futures

Ceramics taught me who I am — not only by giving form to clay, but by drawing me, too, into that process, combined with environments and with people. Now I want to use this material to help build futures for others. Through HINOMIYA and G-E-N, I hope to bring Mino ware's tradition and renewal together, and to weave a new story.