66. Kazunori Hamana 浜名一憲

Kazunori Hamana was born in Osaka in 1969, and grew up in Amagasaki, Hyogo Prefecture. From a young age, he was interested in nature and the impermanence of earthly things. Rather than study to be a doctor or lawyer, as his parents liked, he went his own way.  At age 15, he enrolled in an agricultural high school and left his parents' home to live with farmers in rural Hyogo. Three years later, he left for the U.S. to study environmental studies at Humboldt State University in Northern California. After his studies, his returned to Japan and he settled in Isumi, a small town on the Pacific Ocean in Chiba Prefecture, Japan. There he began making ceramics, and despite increasing success in them, he also continues to work as an organic rice farmer and fisherman. Leading a double life in the big city of Udagawa and the daily rhythm of existence as a farmer and fisherman in the rural surroundings of Isimu is form him essential to his sustainable practice as an artist and his pursuit of truth. Kazunori Hamana is self-taught as a ceramicist, making mainly large but delicate vases from natural clay from Shiga Prefecture, Japan. He finds his inspiration in traditional Japanese tsubos, functional clay pots dating back to prehistoric times, on which he constantly improvises and cultivates with new, inventive techniques in design, glazes, colors and firing. After firing the pots, he places them outside to "mature," where they are sometimes exposed to the elements of weather and environment for years, causing the surfaces to crack and flake off like parched earth. Kazunori Hamana pots may be functional, but are primarily sculptures, irregularly shaped and in earthy colors ranging from bone white to smoky blue-gray; some bearing geometric and organic shapes, stripes, symbols and language. Kazunori Hamana's sculptures are imbued with the beauty of imperfection and the ephemeral, it is in keeping with Japanese tradition but is also contemporary, and in its decorations it has common ground with the paintings of Western modern artists such as Cy Twombly and Jackson Pollock.

Takashi Murakami is now a much sought-after artist. His pieces, sometimes aged for years in all weathers and then restored, are sold around the world, and exhibited in such prominent museums and galleries as the Headlands Center for the Arts in California, the Yokohama Museum of Art, and at Blum & Poe in Tokyo, as well as Los Angeles and New York.