Image: Kazuya Ishida, Spiral vase (螺奏器), 2025

ART EXHIBITION at MURASAKI HALL

KINETIC STILLNESS
Sculptural Ceramics Exhibition

OPENING RECEPTION: RSVP HERE
7:00 - 8:30 PM, Thursday, June 18, 2026
 

EXHIBITION HOURS:
Monday - Friday 12:00pm-6:00pm, Saturday 10:00am-3:00pm
Closed on Sundays & Holidays (June 19, July 3, 4, 20, August 11, and September 7)

Through the concept of kinetic stillness, this exhibition brings together seven Japanese and Japanese American artists who approach ceramics not as vessels for utility or tradition, but as sculptural sites of flux. Through bending, pressing, collapsing, and building, their works foreground the artists’ physicality and material processes, capturing the moment where form holds movement and stillness pulses with memory, while also pointing to a deeper temporal condition within clay itself. Each form bears the imprint of motion and history, embodying what we call kinetic stillness, an energy suspended in silence.

Rooted in geographically oriented Japanese ceramic traditions, some artists are heirs to centuries-old techniques, now pushing those methods toward abstraction or impermanence. Others are Japanese and Japanese American mixed media artists engaging in deep dialogue with the possibilities of clay among other materials.

Featured artists include Chie Fujii, Kazuya Ishida, Takashi Horisaki, Kuniko Kinoto Rino Kodama, Kenta Takaki, and Shoshi Watanabe.

Curated by Kaoru Kuribayashi

Special thanks to a poco art and ATLA

ARTISTS

Chie FUJII

Chie FUJII, a Japanese artist/ceramics maker currently based in Los Angeles, majored in and mastered sculpture and fine art at the Tokyo University of the Arts. Fujii has an extensive background in clay art, using traditional/ancient hand-build techniques that explore the passage of time from antiquity to the present. Fujii currently works as a full-time artist, before 2020, she alongside worked as a studio specialist in the clay department of automotive design studios such as Tesla Design Studio and Honda R&D. Fujii also makes practical items under the name CHIECO Ceramics. When she made her first practical item while making art, she was impressed that it could be blended into daily life and used every day. This is what triggered her to start making practical items. Incorporating art into daily life. That was the main reason she started making practical items.

Kazuya ISHIDA

Kazuya Ishida was born into a family of potters in Bizen Japan. Bizen is one of the six ‘ancient kilns’ and is famous for its traditional unglazed high temperature-fired bizen-style pottery. He uses wood-fired noborigama (multiple chamber climbing kiln) and anagama (single chamber climbing kiln). He trained with Jun Isezaki (a Living National Treasure in Bizen) for four years, followed by time spent in the UK learning different styles of pottery, before he established his own studio in Bizen. Invited into the Anagama Project run by University of Oxford, he has been a lead resident potter teaching kiln making, firing and pottery making, while lecturing about his craft. He makes sculptures and vases featuring his distinctive spiralling marks, created with a technique inspired by a teenage love for breakdancing. In using limited materials (specifically, natural clay and natural ash glazes) in line with the Bizen tradition, he explores the rhythms and patterns of Nature. The contemporary forms of his work are a reflection of the primordial, rippled textures and patterns of the ocean bed, tectonic shifts of a cliff face, and the marks that ebbing tides have left on rock pools, pebbles and seashells.

©Michael Sanchez

Takashi HORISAKI

Takashi Horisaki draws inspiration from architecture, urban planning, and material culture to examine how our physical surroundings intersect with cultural imaginaries, creating a sense of where we belong in the world. Sometimes he uses latex, plastic, or other moldmaking processes to collaboratively collect indexical objects; at other times he uses ceramic and photographic processes to reproduce flat images in three dimensions and vice versa. In his “Social Dress” series, Horisaki has examined how the built environment intersects with social inequality and community-building, working with marginalized communities on creating new self-images through the accessible medium of liquid latex casting combined with community conversation, thus grappling with difficult and conflicting local histories. More recently, Horisaki’s ceramic and photographic “#Instabonsai” series has explored the circulation and transnational development of bonsai as a form through which the cultural politics and formal limits of “Japanese” and “Asian” identities and cultures are negotiated. Through such investigations, Horisaki creates sculptural installations that re-present our physical surroundings, altering the form, rigidity, or color of familiar objects. Combined with storytelling—as recorded in oral histories, photographs, social media, performative lectures, or augmented reality—Horisaki considers the role our material surroundings play in the social life of an ostensibly de-materializing age.

Kuniko KINOTO

1976 Born in Shiga Prefecture
1995 Started to make ceramics at Climbing Kiln Pottery Soutouen Joined the ceramic artist group “SEEDS”
1998 Made ceramics for 1 year in New Zealand
2001 Completed the Graze Course at Industrial Research Center of Shiga Prefecture
2011~ Established a kiln at Hieidaira, Shiga pref.

Rino KODAMA

Kazuya Ishida was born into a family of potters in Bizen Japan. Bizen is one of the six ‘ancient kilns’ and is famous for its traditional unglazed high temperature-fired bizen-style pottery. He uses wood-fired noborigama (multiple chamber climbing kiln) and anagama (single chamber climbing kiln). He trained with Jun Isezaki (a Living National Treasure in Bizen) for four years, followed by time spent in the UK learning different styles of pottery, before he established his own studio in Bizen. Invited into the Anagama Project run by University

Kenta TAKAKI

Kenta Takaki was born in Kumamoto Prefecture in 1986. As a young man, he studied ceramics under Kazuhiro Kanazawa, a fifth-generation potter making Maruo Ware, a popular local ceramic made of red clay. After his apprenticeship with Kanazawa, he became independent and in 2016 established his own kiln working in Amakusa porcelain because he was attracted by the charm of porcelain and its possibilities. He works exclusively in Amakusa clay, a pure white porcelain that has been mined and used in the Amakusa region near Kumamoto for over 250 years. Using this fine porcelain clay, Takaki creates utilitarian vessels for eating and drinking, including elegant bowls and slender dishes. Unlike many traditional porcelains, these vessels are coated with a transparent glaze and no decoration, to emphasize the purity of the clay and the grace of the forms. In addition, the energy of the clay motivates Takaki to create thought-provoking sculptural works – often mimicking other materials, such as paper and food.

Photo by Jason Reuger

Shoshi WATANABE

Shoshi Watanabe is a Japanese ceramicist and teacher based in Los Angeles. As a high school student in Tokyo, Watanabe first began working with clay and considers his exposure to the culture of ceramics in Japan to have had a considerable influence on the style of his functional work. In 2014, he completed an MFA in ceramics from UCLA, where he now supervises students and maintains a studio. Having lived in Los Angeles for 15 years, and worked closely with mentor Adrian Saxe, his work has gradually come to blend Western and Japanese styles and techniques.
Watanabe draws considerable inspiration from Los Angeles: color palettes, a sense of ease and utility, a diversity of cultures. Some of his most-used glazes are based on 50-year-old glaze recipes from California, passed down by Saxe. California runs deeply through his practice, even as his sense of rhythm and balance, and hand-application of glazes, distinctly recall Japanese traditions. Watanabe sees ceramics as alchemy, in which elements derived from the earth — clay, minerals, and organic materials — are transformed to create artifacts that tie directly to their place of origin.

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