65. Nagae Shigekazu  長江 重和

Nagae Shigekazu was born in the ancient ceramic city of Seto in Aichi Prefecture and studied at the Seto Ceramic Training Institute, where he would later teach. He grew up in a family of potters and was intrigued by the process of slip casting from an early age. Slip casting is a shaping technique for the mass production of pottery in which liquid slip is poured into a mold. It is used for hollow forms and other shapes that cannot easily be formed by other techniques such as a potter's wheel. When he was growing up, there was little regard for this technique for creating unique and individual works of art, and accidentally deformed, and thus failed pieces were immediately destroyed.  Nagae Shigekazu changed this view, and he was one of the first to maipulate the intensity of kiln fire and use it to deliberately distort and bend porcelain into shapes previously unthinkable. Using age-old techniques and molds from his hometown, Nagae Shigekazu pushes the possibilities and limits of ceramic molding and helps redefine a craft that sometimes involves repeated production. His work is characterized by innovative techniques and forms in flowing lines of transparent white porcelain. But he also ignores the use of traditional colors and glazes and introduces the toshikomi technique, dripping liquid slip into molds before deforming them in the kiln, leading to a beautiful and subtle mélange of colors.
Delicate and fascinating, Shigekazu Nagae's works have received national and international acclaim. He has become a leading figure in contemporary ceramic art and his work is included in the collections of such prestigious museums as the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the National Gallery of Australia and the Musée National de Ceramique-Sèvres in Paris and the Sèvres National Museum.