History&News

Born in Fukuoka in 1961. In 1976, he began his apprenticeship under his father at the Yoron-yaki pottery studio. In 1999, he founded the Ishigaki pottery studio on Ishigaki Island in Okinawa Prefecture, near Kabira Bay, famous for the color of its ocean. Between 2009 and 2015, he created the first Konoha Tenmoku pottery under Okinawa’s natural conditions, the world’s first Yohen-Rin Tenmoku pottery (which was later included in the collection of the British Museum), and explored glazes from Fujian Province, China, dating back a thousand years, perfecting the ideal Yuteki Tenmoku technique. He also created a glaze using minerals from Ishigaki and fired it with transparent glass, successfully achieving a blue color that reflected the ocean off Ishigaki. (His installation work, “Silent Blue Wall,” which he exhibited at the Salon des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2015, was selected by the Japanese Embassy in France to represent Japan and won two gold medals.) He is currently working on creating contemporary art pieces based on a fusion of the black of Yuteki Tenmoku porcelain and the Ishigaki Blue color of glass, and is active in Europe, Taiwan, Japan, and elsewhere. He pursues new possibilities for expression that transcend the boundaries of traditional ceramic techniques and worldviews. He is also involved in cultural exchange and the donation of techniques, such as unearthing and recreating lost ceramic techniques in Mongolia, Japan, and other places, and proposing specific ways to utilize them in the modern world.