Jun Nishida

Jun Nishida (西田潤, Nishida Jun, 1977 – March 26, 2005) was a Japanese ceramicist. He is best known for his massive conceptual pottery pieces, which experiment with the material capacities of clay and the imaginative forms that ceramics could take amid the intense thermochemical conditions of the kiln. Throughout his brief yet productive career, Nishida pushed the boundaries of contemporary ceramics, challenging conventions of scale, abstraction, and method to produce a radically new visual language of pottery.

In his monumental series, Zetsu (絶) (2000-2005), Nishida melded porcelain pieces and powdered glaze into enormous agglomerations that would morph, crack, and distort in unpredictable fashion, which he proceeded to carve and chisel after removing from the kiln to produce evocative sculptural forms. From 2000 onward, his work was featured in a number of solo and group exhibitions across Japan, including the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, Osaka Contemporary Art Center, Ibaraki Ceramic Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Ceramic Art, Gifu. Nishida also received prizes at ceramic competitions across Asia and Europe, including the bronze prize at the 1st Korea International Ceramic Biennale in 2001, and the Grand Prix at the 53rd International Contemporary Ceramic Biennale in Faenza, Italy. He began by creating large mold-cast porcelain pieces, often shaped in semicircular and tubular forms, which were then mixed with glaze and poured into spherical or cuboid containers. The potassium-feldspar glaze was notably used as a structural material in its powdered form, rather than a surface treatment as a slurry. After letting the kiln cool for several more days, Nishida would climb into the kiln, typically with the help of assistants, to remove the iron and brick framework using power tools. The artist then proceeded to vigorously smash, chisel, and hammer the matrix to reveal extruded forms and partially baked and molten portions of clay and glaze. His exploded forms are texturally diverse; smoothly glazed undulating surfaces suddenly transition into violent protrusions and untamed, jagged edges. When viewed up close, the surfaces recall icebergs, patterns in the soil, rock formations and other features of the natural landscape. Nishida embraced unpredictability as part of the artistic process, working against the pursuit of precision and coherence often associated with ceramics. Instead, he allowed the material to morph and come into its form through a combination of human and non-human forces. Even with the understanding of the works as organic and living entities, Nishida still treated his pieces with chemical interventions to stabilize their forms. These synthetic adhesives yellowed, crystallized, and become opaque over time, thus requiring intensive conservation work to not only maintain the structural form of the objects, but their surface quality and white appearances as well. The pieces from this series are particularly massive among Nishida's oeuvre, many of them clocking in at over 1,000 kilograms.

The monograph on the Zetsu series, first published in 2006, was re-issued in 2018 after Nishida’s work received increased attention in the years following his death.

Collections

Museum of Contemporary Ceramic Art, Gifu Kyoto Seika University Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama Minneapolis Institute of Art Museum of Ceramics, Faenza, World Ceramic Expo, Korea Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Brooklyn Museum,