Yuji Ueda, Yoichi Umetsu: Fair Trade - About the contemporary art industry and the ceramic industry

Since 2021, I have been making pottery in Shigaraki, one of Japan’s Six Ancient Kilns. 

Shigaraki-made “Shigaraki ware” refers to an understated style of stoneware pottery characterized by its scarlet colors, natural ash glaze, and burnt finish derived from firing the high-quality Shigaraki clay in climbing kilns. Shigaraki clay is also well-suited for making large pieces, due to its fire resistance, plasticity, and excellent strength. Shigaraki ware casts itself as “the art of man, earth, and fire,” a sales phrase that points to the uniqueness of an object marked by both the intentionality of human hands and the contingencies of the firing process. In other words, the object’s uniqueness is precisely what makes it valuable. It is the same in painting, where the singularity of an artist’s brush strokes or application of color is especially sought after. Furthermore, it could also be said that what makes art activism art — as opposed to political activism — is precisely its focus, over concrete political achievements, on the failures and difficulties that occur in the process of seeking change for a better society. In other words, the peculiarities and significance that emerge from human intervention have a fundamental underlying value.

The pottery manufacturing industry defines Shigaraki. The proportion of ceramics — dishes, umbrella stands, flowerpots, tanuki figurines — that are mass-produced by large workshops is overwhelmingly higher than the traditional Shigaraki ware made by individual potters. The city itself, too, is overflowing with ceramics, up to its very building materials such as tiles or bricks. While most of Shigaraki’s pottery is indeed mass-produced, about half of this happens through manual labor on the part of its potters. By purposely not automating everything, the system leaves room for each piece to retain its own unique flavor. However, these are distributed not as artwork but as products. While living and making ceramics in Shigaraki, it was made clear to me anew that “creation” is not an act that can be imputed solely to an individual.

On a different note, Ueda and I met in Shigaraki in the fall of 2021. At the time both of us were, for one reason or another, completely tired of life; gradually we became friends who shared our artwork with each other. Not to get overly personal, but I have very few “artist friends,” and Ueda was the first in a long time. However, we are not so close that we keep in constant contact; the only thing we have in common is ceramics. Ueda’s artwork is concentrated less on the qualities conferred by his handiwork and more on the potential of the soil, on taking the contingency of the firing process as far as it will go — that is, in a way it functions as a small laboratory. In fact, the only difference between his clay and his glaze are the ratios of the ingredients. Ueda treats pottery clay, porcelain clay, and glaze as equivalent elements and blends them without discrimination, layering and molding materials with different shrinkage rates and levels of fire resistance as if he were making a mille-feuille. He often collects the soil from the mountains by himself, but he purchases the feldspars and other minerals used in the mix from pottery material manufacturers. Ceramic artists can easily get their hands on small amounts of these materials precisely because the infrastructure for the industry is already in place. In other words, most individual ceramic artists are supported by the surplus generated by the pottery manufacturing industry that creates mass-produced goods. Ueda’s works also feature complex expressive qualities and forms that resemble cooled and hardened lava, but these emerge not from expressionistic impulses but rather from a fusion of the precise calculations of materials engineering and a traditional potter’s intuitions.

The subjects are extremely orthodox — pots, egg-shaped objects, dorodango balls — but, adhering to established earthenware theories at one moment and deviating from them the next, the works he creates have little practical use. By eliminating practicality, the work approaches an objet, stepping into the realm of “pure art.” It could perhaps be said that Ueda’s works have abandoned their practical nature as vessels, and have been optimized as works of art.

By mystifying the artist’s work with words such as “nature” or “fire, earth, and human heart,” we overshadow the infrastructure and the environment that support artists in the pottery and ceramic industries. And in these “SDG” (Sustainable Development Goals)-extolling times, we cannot offer any passable justification for pottery created as impractical “pure art.” This is why it is not good if the artist's urge to create and the desire of the wealthy to buy artwork are the only things that come together to complete the creation of an artwork. In such case, we end up with artwork that is only meant for making money. There is no such thing as equivalent exchange between people, or between a material and the energy that is put into it. The potters of Shigaraki call eccentric objects “hechimon.” This is exactly what Ueda and I create. However, hechimon cannot exist without a legitimate order and substructure. We must not forget that anomalies and kikikaikai (eccentricities) always materialize only in these conditions.”

Yoichi Umetsu