39. Jun Nishida  西田潤

Nishida Jun was born in 1977 in Osaka and studied ceramics at Kyoto Seika University. He died in 2005 at the age of 28 as a result of an electric kiln explosion while working with local artisans in Java, Indonesia.  A tragic loss for the ceramics world, because in his short age he managed to produce work that was unparalleled.

Jun Nishida is widely recognized as a genius for his radical and intense views on ceramic art, and the method he used to do it, which he described as a process of "excavation" (kussaku). Large cast pieces of porcelain were mixed with glaze and poured into spherical or cubic containers. The glaze mainly served as a construction material rather than a decorative element for the surface. After firing, which sometimes took four days, the object was pried loose from the container using power tools, after which the actual shaping process only began. By forcibly breaking pieces, chiseling and hammering, a shape of partially baked and molten parts of clay and glaze was created and the final art object was revealed, or "excavated". With his views on ceramics and his unique way of working, Jun Nishida went further than any avant-garde movement before, not only resisting the categorical conventions of ceramic objects, the distinction between functionality and sculpturality (as the Sōdeisha movement had already done), but also challenging the fundamental perception that the ceramic process is finite the moment it is taken out of the kiln. On the contrary, only then does the actual design process begin with Jun Nishia, who with his unique, gigantic pieces, some of which are one and a half meters high and weigh 1000 kg, also challenges all existing associations of porcelain as fragile and delicate.

Nishida received a lot of attention during his lifetime. From 2000, his work has been featured in a number of solo and group exhibitions across Japan, including the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, and has received awards at ceramics competitions in Asia and Europe, including the Grand Prix at the 53 International Contemporary Ceramic Biennale in Faenza and taught at Kyoto Seika University. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Brooklyn Museum and the Ackland Art Museum.