9. Miyashita Zenji 宮下善爾

Miyashita Zenji 宮下善爾 (1939-2012) was the son of the renowned Miyashita Zenju宮下善寿(1901-1988). He did not want to be trained by his father and chose to study at the Kyoto Arts and Crafts University where he graduated in 1964. Miyashita's early career gained momentum after he was selected for the prestigious Nitten Exhibition the same year of his graduation. He would win these annual competitions no less than eighteen times. Because of his success with the Nitten group, he often acted as a judge at art competitions and won awards himself, including the Japan Contemporary Craft Art Exhibition Foreign Minister's Award and the Kyoto Craft Art New Artist Award.

It is not difficult to understand why Mayashito Zenji's work has had so much success. Each piece is of high perfection in form and appearance, exuding a wonderful, almost fairy-tale atmosphere. The perfect nuances and subtle color matching make them seem like hushed landscapes in the early morning. He achieved this effect not by using glazes but by applying extremely thin layers of subtly colored clay in irregular bands on the surface of the object. Using this "saidei," or colored clay overlay technique to create a striated appearance, he was able to transform his objects into hushed landscapes or seascapes. Or, in his own words, "I want to explore the boundless concrete and abstract forms that develop in my imagination and express them in my work. My goal in my current work is a delightful musical performance: a harmony of color and a restrained feel of the clay in the background of quiet scenes." In this he has succeeded; decoration and form of his works form a surreal whole of pure beauty and have consequently been included in exhibitions around the world and purchased by major museums in Japan, the U.S. and Europe, including the Aichi Prefectural Museum, the British Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

                   Vase - Museum  of Fine Arts, Boston