When he built an anagama kiln (a sloping tubular chamber for firing clay with wood) in 1968, the 31-year-old ceramicist Yasuhisa Kohyama was a relative unknown. It was the first such kiln to be constructed since Japan’s medieval period and a highly unusual attempt by a modern artist to recreate the rough aesthetic of Japan’s ancient Jomon culture.
The effort attracted much attention in the small world of fine-art
ceramics. It wasn’t long before Sherman Lee, renowned expert on Asian
art and then director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, acquired
Kohyama’s work, which mixes utilitarian and sculptural ideas. Cleveland
was the first in a long list of great museums to collect the artist
(including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum
of Art).
In the following decades, Kohyama developed ties to Northern Ohio’s
own ceramics community. Last year, he visited the Cleveland Institute
of Art, where he developed the pieces in the current show at the
Sculpture Center. Kent State University artists Kirk Mangus and Eva
Kwong — working with CIA’s Judith Salomon, William Brouillard and
Amy Sinbondit — located Ohio clays similar to the
silicate-encrusted Japanese clay that Kohyama favors, then fired up an
anagama-style kiln built into a Kent hillside. In the Sueki or
wood-fire tradition, arranging objects to utilize the fire’s path as it
rushes with ever-increasing power and heat from a firebox at the lower
end upward toward a flue is as much an art as making the objects
themselves. Kohyama’s work was carefully placed so that subtle
coloration made by flame and fly ash would tint the work with pale
ochres; it was angled so the brunt of the fire would smooth some parts
and roughen others.
The result is a series of objects that have the look of sandstone
exposed to long ages of wind and weather. They seem like artifacts from
prehistoric times blended by imperceptible degrees with a more
contemporary idealism. These are very simple, yet in complex ways,
attractive objects, commanding the space they occupy in the graceful
manner of beautiful, living things.
Some, like “Sora” (Space), a round vase more than five feet in
circumference marked by a pale stain like a patch of light, are
traditional vessel or vase-like forms. But “Homura” (Flame) rises from
an angular base, then folds and flickers as it terminates in a two-part
corona of clay. “Kaze” (Wind) is smooth on one side where the fire
rushed past and is shaped like an axe or adze head with a hole at the
top; it seems sharpened by centuries of wear. Still others, like the
pretzel-like “Nishihe” (To West), are three-dimensional interpretations
of classical Chinese written characters. Kohyama’s mastery of clay,
evoking elemental forces, seems to lever the solid reality of his
materials out of the present, toward a distant past or future of
essential form.
This article appears in Nov 18-24, 2009.