21.  Matsui Kōsei  松井 康成

Yasunari Matsui was born in 1927 in Honmoku, Nagano Prefecture but spent his childhood in Kawasaki and later in Kasama-cho, in Ibaraki Prefecture, his father's birthplace. After the war, he worked part time at Okuda Pottery, located under the Gesso-ji Temple in Kasama, where he learned pottery making techniques. From 1947 to 1952, he studied literature at Meiji University, but also studied Chinese, Korean and Japanese ceramics intensively at the Tokyo National Museum. He married the eldest daughter of the high priest of the Gesso-ji Temple. Due to illness of his father-in-law, Yasunari Matsui became the twenty-fourth high priest of the Gesso-ji Temple in 1955. The temple was equipped with a kiln from the Edo period, Matsui restored this kiln and researched and produced works that imitated ancient Japanese and Chinese ceramics and kneading techniques. He then tried various traditional techniques such as inlay, scraping, sketching, overglazing, texture, kneading, glazing, etc., but from 1968 he would concentrate entirely on neriage, studying ancient Chinese examples of this technique. Neriage is a difficult technique in which multiple colors and types of clay are combined, rolled out and combined again until a marble-like effect is created. In the process, cracks are likely to occur due to differences in the contraction speed of the different types of clay. Matsui used these cracks to create complex patterns and modern geometric surfaces, from which a completely new world of ceramics was developed. Matsui Kōsei played an important role in reviving the neriage technique, and was declared a Living National Treasure in 1993. His work is in the collections of all major museums worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.