Sueharu Fukami

Sueharu Fukami (深見陶治 , born 1947) is a Japanese ceramic artist and sculptor known for his work in pale-blue qinbai porcelain (also referred to as Sei Hakuji / Celadon). Fukami's abstracted, sculptural ceramic works depart from the traditional Japanese artisan traditions of his upbringing and instead explore natural phenomena and universal senses like "infinite space" through sharp silhouettes, sweeping curves, architecturally-inspired arches, and delicately-colored glaze. His minimalist approach to porcelains has contributed to defining and expanding the meaning, importance, and popularity of contemporary Japanese ceramics beyond craft art circles, most notably to fine art collectors and museums globally.

Biography Fukami was born in the Sennyu-ji temple area in Higashiyama, the eastern mountains of Kyoto, Japan. Higashiyama is a traditional center of the city's renowned ceramic industry and highly populated with potters' workshops and ceramicists. He was born the sixth child after two boys and three girls, and was surrounded by a vibrant local ceramics community as a child. Later, Fukami's father and elder brothers Takehisa and Naokatsu reinvented the family business to focus on fine, hand-painted porcelain vessels for kaiseki food ceremonies. Their handling of the family firm allowed Fukami to focus on developing a personal style out of experiments with numerous ceramic object types.

Education and professional activity Fukami studied ceramics at Kyoto Arts and Crafts Training Centre and graduated at age eighteen in 1965. Fukami subsequently submitted of one of his porcelain works to the prestigious Nitten Exhibition (The Japan Fine Arts Exhibition), one of Japan's largest art competitions. Its acceptance and inclusion in the prestigious venue allowed him to earn early notoriety as an artist and commit fully to a career as a professional ceramicist.

Fukami's ceramic sculptures were introduced outside of Japan for the first time when he won Grand Prix for the 43rd Premio Faenza in 1985. Fukami became the third Japanese ceramicist ever to win this internationally acclaimed annual ceramic art competition held in Faenza, Emilia-Romagna, Italy.

This came on the heels of Fukami's major retrospective of early works at the Ruth and Sherman Lee Institute for Japanese Art at the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture in Hanford, California in 2002. In 2002, American collector and founder of the Lee Institute, Willard G. Clark, visited Fukami's Kyoto studio and acquired forty early works for the Institute as promised gifts. One of these pieces was Haruka na Umi (Distant Ocean), a prize-winning ceramic sculpture from the 1976 Japan Contemporary Arts and Crafts Exhibition. Another one of Fukami's noted early works from 1974 is a large, hand-built stoneware sculpture in irabo (brown ash) glaze titled Wakakihi no Rinri (Morals of a Young Day) whose top represents a national flag while its body signifies the masses oppressed by national ideology. His 1972 work Ehon no yume (The Dream of the Picture Book) took a poetic, whimsical form: a pottery book opened to reveal a blue-and-white porcelain balloon on which Fukami invited his young niece to draw pictures of popular anime characters. Five years after committing to qinbai glaze, Fukami developed his unique high-pressure slip-casting technique, which involves the pressurized injection of liquid clay into specially-made plaster molds, condensed to remove air pockets and impurities. The molds are produced with semi-porcelain and covered in plaster, often created in pieces and fitted together to assemble the final sculptural form. Fukami aims to create about eight pieces per individual mold, sometimes over the span of several years, with some pieces taking from three months to a year to complete. With this process, Fukami is typically able to produce only 6 to 8 sculptures per year. Distinctively, instead of the common desire of most potters to leave traces like finger marks visible in the clay, Fukami strives to leave no indication of human creation. Fukami's works also often feature collaborations with artists and technicians who create specifically designed wood and metal stands for the finished pieces. Fukami's own practice adapts the colored glaze's sense of sharpness with a thinning of the glaze at the piece's edges to reveal a gradient whiteness of the porcelain. Fukami's pieces combine historical techniques with minimalist, spontaneous forms, pushing the medium of porcelain into abstracted and contemporary territory. His work makes a clear break from other Japanese ceramic movements of the mid-twentieth century such as the mingei folk movement promoted by such artists as Hamada Shōji, instead harkening back to dynastic Chinese aesthetics unrelated to his Japanese background.

Influences

Fukami has cited Italian ceramicist Carlo Zauli (1926–2002) as a major artistic inspiration. Zauli's 1973 traveling solo exhibition in Japan had influenced many Japanese abstract ceramicists. In 1980, Fukami won the Newcomer Prize of Kyoto Prefecture Arts and Crafts Exhibition. As a prize, he was awarded a one-month research trip to Italy during which time he befriended Zauli. Fukami has also mentioned that as a young artist, he was inspired by the Sōdeisha potters, a post-war Japanese avant-garde ceramic movement headed by potter Kazuo Yagi (1918–1979). Fukami describes his connection to these abstract ceramicists as instinctual and intimate, using the Japanese term akogare, or a "yearning for," to describe their influence. He describes his ceramic forms as abstract in meaning and non-representational, disconnected from Japanese identity in favor of associations with wider human experiences such as viewing landscapes, reading abstract ideas, and interacting with other sculptural artists.

Museum representation Fukami's work has been presented in the following museums: Ackland Art Museum, Musée Ariana, Art Institute of Chicago, British Museum, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Everson Museum of Art, Hetjens Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, Sèvres – Cité de la céramique, MIC Faenza International Museum of Ceramics, Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Art and History (Geneva), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, National Gallery of Australia, National Museum of Art, Osaka, National Museum of History, Taiwan, National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, New Orleans Museum of Art, North Carolina Museum of Art, Portland Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Rijksmuseum, Spencer Museum of Art, St Louis Museum of Art, Suntory Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, Victoria & Albert Museum.

Public collections Fukami's works have been acquired in nearly 80 public collections, including: the Musée national de céramique-Sèvres; Victoria & Albert Museum; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Argentina Museum of Modern Art; Japan House, Argentina; Musée Ariana; Musée d'Art et d'Histoire; The British Museum; Brooklyn Museum of Art; The Everson Museum of Art; MIC Faenza International Museum of Ceramics; French Culture Foundation; Hetjens Museum; International Permanent Collection of Modern Art, Yugoslavia; Musée de design et d'arts appliqués contemporains; The RISD Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Newcastle Art Gallery; New Orleans Museum of Art; North Carolina Museum of Art; Portland Art Museum; Saint Louis Art Museum; Spencer Museum of Art; The Art Institute of Chicago; National Museum of History, Taiwan; Yale University Art Gallery; Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum; Chazen Museum of Art; Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art; Kyoto Prefectural Library and Archives; Museum of Modern Ceramic Art, Japan; Suntory Museum, Japan; The Japan Foundation, Japan; The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Japan; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; National Museum of Art, Osaka; Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Japan; Tokoname City Education Bureau; Tsurui Museum of Art; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Auckland War Memorial Museum; National Gallery of Australia; Ackland Art Museum; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Harvard Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; MOA Museum of Art, Japan; Rakusui-tei Museum of Art; French Culture Foundation; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Kyoto State Guest House; Ibaraki Ceramic Art Museum; Musée Tomo; Museum of Modern Ceramic Art, Gifu; Museum of Contemporary Ceramic Art, Shiga; Museum of Kyoto; The Museum of Ceramic Art, Hyogo; Okada Museum of Art; Yanagisawa Collection; National Museum of Scotland; Museo Carlo Zauli; Musée des arts décoratifs; Lotte Reimers-Foundation; Museum of Decorative Arts; Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires; Smithsonian Museum, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery; Peabody Essex Museum; Burke Collection; Newark Museum; Asian Art Museum of San Francisco; Birmingham Museum of Art.

Selected awards

1985 – Grand Prize, Faenza International Ceramic Exhibition 1992 – Grand Prize, MOA Mokichi Okada Art 1997 – The Kyoto Prefecture Culture Prize, Prize for Artistic Merit 2008 – Kyoto City Person of Cultural Merit 2012 – Gold Prize, Japan Ceramic Society

Selected exhibitions 1986

44th International Competition of Ceramic Art – Faenza, Italy Hetjens Museum – Düsseldorf, Germany

1987

Galerie Maghi Bettini – Amsterdam, the Netherlands Galerie Maya Behn – Zurich, Switzerland Musée des Arts Decoratifs de la Ville de Lausanne, Switzerland

1993

"Modern Japanese Ceramics in American Collections" – Japan Society, New York / New Orleans Museum of Art / Honolulu Academy of Art, USA

1995

"Japanese Studio Craft: Tradition and Avant-garde" – Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK

2002

Garth Clark Gallery, New York, USA

2003

"Japan–Ceramics and Photography: Tradition and Today," Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany The Ruth and Sherman Lee Institute for Japanese Art at The Clark Center, Hanford, USA

2005

Faenza International Ceramics Museum, Italy

2006

"Contemporary Clay: Japanese Ceramics for the New Century" – Japan Society Gallery, New York USA "Tōji: Avant-Garde et Tradition de la Ceramique Japonaise" – Musée national de céramique-Sèvres, France

2008

"The Dauer Collection, California State University" – University Library Gallery, USA

2011

"Purity of Form" – The Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture, Hanford, USA "Modern Celadon: Ambient Green Flow – the Emergence and Rise of East Asian Celadon" – New Taipei City Yingge Ceramic Museum, Taiwan

2012

Vallauris Ceramics Biennale, France

2013

TEFAF Maastricht, The Netherlands "A Distant View: The Porcelain Sculpture of Sueharu Fukami" – Garden Pavilion, Portland Japanese Garden, USA

2014

"Fukami Sueharu Porcelain Sculptures" – Eric Thomsen Japanese Art, New York, USA Art Stage Singapore, Singapore Art Miami, USA "Celadon Now: Techniques and Beauty Handed Down from Southern Song to Today" – National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo / The Museum of Ceramic Art, Hyogo, Japan

2016

Spring Masters, New York, USA EAF Monaco, Monaco

2017

TEFAF New York Spring, USA "The Greatest Story Ever Told: The Collection Curated by Ryan Gander" – National Museum of Art, Osaka

2019

West Bund Art and Design, Shanghai, China "Silhouettes of Tomorrow," Yufuku Gallery, London, UK "Kichizaemon X I Fukami Sueharu x Kichizaemon XV" – Raku Jikinyu, Sagawa Art Museum, Sagawa, Japan

2020

"Reopening Celebration I ART in LIFE, LIFE and BEAUTY" – Suntory Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan "Opening Ceremony" – A Lighthouse called Kanata, Tokyo, Japan

2021

"The Secret Show, A Lighthouse called Kanata, Tokyo, Japan "All our stories are incomplete / colours of the imagination" – Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery The Armory Show, New York, USA ART 021, Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair, China Untitled Art Miami Beach, USA

2022

"Pure Form: Japanese Sculptural Ceramics" – Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia "A Lighthouse called Kanata New York Pop-Up" – New York, USA Masterpiece London, UK