Koichiro Isezaki, Bizen Tea Bowl - 備前 茶盌, (C25965)
Just a few miles from where I live, in the Hudson Valley, there’s a man who makes miracles in the woods. His name is Jeff Shapiro, and he is one of the world’s great anagama potters. He has been here since 1981, firing his wood kiln a couple of times a year. His work is inspired by local glacial rocks, their seasonal carapaces of summer moss and winter ice. Yet Shapiro learned his craft in Japan, where he lived for nine years, including in the historic ceramic center of Bizen. The potters he met there impressed him, he once told me, as “Japanese versions of James Dean” – they didn’t say much, but there was such depth under that still surface.
Culture, however, never stays put. In a fascinating case of cultural exchange, among the potters that Shapiro has helped to train is Koichiro Isezaki (born 1974), who is himself from Bizen, and whose father is a master in the craft. Why, then, would he have needed to apprentice himself in upstate New York? The answer is abundantly clear in this powerful teabowl. It has the materiality of classic Bizen ware: stoneware baked a rich red, with delicate passages of ashfall glaze and bare patches where the pot was shielded during the firing. So far, so traditional. But then there is the shape – and what a shape. It sits slightly askew. The walls are deeply gouged, as if struck off with a chisel. Look at it from above, and it describes the shape of some strange flower.
Like all my favorite ceramics, it manages to be at once rough-and-tumble and deeply sophisticated – qualities that, in Isezaki’s case, I’m inclined to associate with America and Japan, respectively. Except I know it’s not that simple. These two ceramic cultures have been learning from one another for decades now, their mutual interaction producing one great object after another. Isezaki’s tea bowl is just the latest statement in that long story of aesthetic kinship. But no one has ever said it better.
Glenn Adamson
Independent Curator and Art Writer