Shiro Tsujimura, To be an artist. To think like a monk

Shiro Tsujimura

To be an artist. To think like a monk

Axel Vervoordt Gallery Hong Kong

May 25 –July 20, 2024

Axel Vervoordt Gallery is delighted to present Shiro Tsujimura’s first solo show in the Hong Kong Gallery. The exhibition covers the gallery’s entire 21^st floor, presenting an overview of Tsujimura's art as a radical ceramist and independent calligrapher. The exhibition explores his extensive characteristics, which embody a sense of freedom and spiritual connection with nature. For Tsujimura, working with clay and fire is simultaneously a physical act and spiritual path: to be an artist and to think like a monk. The exhibition coincides with the worldwide launch of the newly published book, Shiro Tsujimura. An Art of Living (Flammarion, 2024) featuring essays by Hiroshi Sugimoto and Alexandra Munroe.

Tsujimura’s approach to ceramics is linked to his training as a monk and his radical independence. Instead of following typical Japanese tea ceramicist training, steeped in formalities, he’s a fierce individualist and unconventional artist. Transcending traditional techniques, Tsujimura infuses his practice with a sense of freedom, playfulness, authenticity, and self-confidence that results in decidedly unique works. The beauty and uniqueness of his artistic language exists in its vitality, embodying the passing of time and notions of perfection and imperfection. Alexandra Munroe, Guggenheim Senior Curator of Asian Art and long-time friend of the artist, writes: “Tsujimura goes beyond ‘unorthodoxy’ in the context of traditional Japanese ceramics to emerge as a universal artist of our time: original, vital and free.” In this way, she compares Tsujimura to the Gutai artists who were active in nearby Osaka in the 1950s and ‘60s, presenting the same raw violence of material and chance as the nature of art in their work.

Tsujimura dreamed of becoming a painter, but soon abandoned his studies at the art school in Tokyo, to begin a monastic training at the remote Zen temple Sanshoji. In 1970, he was struck by the beauty and sincerity of a 16^th-century Oido tea bowl in the Japan Folk Crafts Museum in Tokyo where a Japanese philosopher Soetsu Yanagi promoted the crafts movement in Japan. The Oido tea bowl was inconspicuously displayed in the corner of the museum in such a manner that it hardly drew any attention. Moreover, no box contains a signature or note of authentication. Yet, intuitively and profoundly, Tsujimura experienced an epiphany from the bowl, feeling a spiritual connection that seemed to impart a lesson on the attitude towards life, transcending all physical aspects—beyond shape, colour, and the texture of the clay. It’s an ordinary bowl, yet perceived the entire universe, holding peacefulness, intricacy, and an appreciation for the impermanent life that he sought to embody himself. Since that day, Tsujimura decided to become a potter.

Together with his wife Mieko, Tsujimura acquired an isolated, idyllically located place of woodland in the forest of Mima, in Nara Prefecture where he built a hut and a tea house. There, he built seven kilns on the mountainside and started an independent career as a self-taught artist. He experimented with Iga, Hagi, and Shigaraki wares, transcending the boundaries between art and craft. Despite employing traditional tools, techniques, and materials in his ceramic works, Tsujimura imbued his creations with a sense of creative liberation and emotive power, manifesting as visual art. He forages his clay from the iron-rich soil of his property near Nara. Axel Vervoordt explains his interest in Tsujimura’s art: “He can express a tremendous strength with as much silence and discretion. It brings peace and connects us to the power and fire of Mother Earth.”

Each room in the exhibition showcases a specific type of ceramic ware: large round Tsubo vases in Shigaraki style; tall square Midori flower vases in Iga style; a selection of round white Kohiki and Jido vases in various sizes. The artworks are placed on specially designed low platforms, which are reminiscent of tokonoma spaces.

Tsujimura is perhaps best known for Tsubo works. In the 16^th century, these large recipients were used to store tea leaves or rice. They were appreciated for their large scale and the natural abstractions of the ash-glazed surface created in the kiln by cracks, drippings, and chips appearing on the earthy skin. By the 20^th century, the Japanese had designated a few Shigaraki Tsubo as national treasures, the highest category of art-historical and aesthetic value attributed to objects of art. Tsujimura has taken this to the next level by also appreciating the accidents that result from the kiln firing. His appreciation for imperfection and impermanence is related to the traditional Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi.

The exhibition demonstrates Tsujimura’s skill in larges as well as small ceramic objects. The miniature white Kohiki vases placed in the burnt rack and the small hanging flower vases in the Iga style present the same irregular shapes and earthy, natural ash-glazed surfaces, which makes them unique and characterises Tsujimura’s practice.

The calligraphy works on paper were created in December 2013 during a live performance at Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Kanaal. Presenting the poetic nouns “Terracotta”, “Snow”, and “Flower”, they seem to reflect on nature embracing the Zen principles of naturalness, simplicity, and artistic spirit. The artist expresses through the brushstrokes and the flow of ink a dynamic and mindful engagement with the paper. For Tsujimura, ceramics and calligraphy are spontaneous art forms. Both require a high degree of spontaneity and intuition, values that Tsujimura holds in high regard. He states, “Art is an expression from the body”.

Since the late 1970s, Tsujimura has exhibited in major international museums, such as The British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1983, contemporary artist Hiroshi Sugimoto (°1948), who held an antique shop in New York at that time, presented Tsujimura’s work in a solo exhibition. Since then, numerous international exhibitions in the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, France, and Belgium followed. In 1999, he managed to become only the second modern Japanese ceramicist, after Shin Fujihira, to exhibit his pottery in the Chado Shiryokan in Kyoto. Today, Tsujimura’s pottery can be seen in museums of around the world.

Glossary:

• Shigaraki(信楽): Stoneware made in and around the town of Shigaraki, in Shiga Prefecture. Shigaraki ware’s white clay takes on various shades of red, ranging from pink to scarlet or deep brown nuances due to firing effects.
  
• Iga (伊賀): Stoneware made in Iga, Mie Prefecture, and in nearby villages. Iga ware is well known for its rich, natural colour schemes, produced by high-temperature wood firing, and the dynamic, irregular form of the pottery. Iga clay, particularly from the Mount Shirado areas in Nara Prefecture, produces a glassy, greenish quality known as “vidro” glaze on the surface of pieces, due to the chemical reaction when firewood ash combines with fieldspath and siliceous stone in the clay during high-temperature firing.
  
• Kohiki (粉引き): Kohiki refers to an iron-rich clay body that is partially or completely covered with white slip followed by a translucent glaze and is then fired.
• Jido (磁土 / 白磁): White porcelain vase, made from white clay and coated with a transparent or translucent glaze, then fired at high temperatures. This type of ceramic is distinguished by its use of a transparent glaze that enhances the whiteness of the base material.
• Tokonoma (床の間): A kind of sacred alcove in a traditional Japanese room with a slightly elevated platform from the floor, where artistic or culturally significant items are displayed to evoke poetry and respect for beauty.
  

Literature:

A. MUNROE, H. SUGIMOTO, A. VERVOORDT, Shiro Tsujimura. An Art of Living (Flammarion, 2024).