22. Wada Morihiro 和太守卑良

Wada Morihiro was born in 1944 in Hyogo Prefecture and died in 2008. He studied ceramics at the Kyoto City College of Arts. After graduation, he received a request to restore an old kiln in Aki, Kochi Prefecture, after which he established a kiln in the city of Kasama, Ibaraki Prefecture, in 1977. The move to Kasama allowed him to break away from the more classical aesthetic of Kyoto and develop his own , very broad repertoire of motifs and decoration techniques, including slip decoration, inlay work, wax-printing, carving, underglaze, blue and white (sometsuke) and fuki-e, where the glaze is not applied directly with a brush, but splashed (using a fine wire mesh) or blown very finely onto the surface. His work is powerful, intriguing and ever-changing with motifs derived from nature but abstracted into tokens and intricate abstract patterns. With his objects, Wada Morihiro became one of the most popular ceramic artists of his generation. As early as 1979, he was given a solo exhibition at the Minami Aoyama Green gallery, and since then Wada rose in reputation and fame and had numerous solo exhibitions at top venues, after which he also broke through internationally. He won many awards including a gold prize in Faenza, Italy in 1980, and his work can be found at all the leading museums worldwide such as Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Faenza International Museum of Ceramics in Italy, the Musée National de Céramique, Sèvres in France, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Tokyo National Museum of Art.