By Will Lerner, Communications Manager for Portland Japanese Garden & Japan Institute

Portland Japanese Garden’s first art exhibition of 2025, Earthen Elegance: The Ceramic Art of Bizen, opened in February and is on view now through June 9 in the Pavilion Gallery. This exhibition, featuring work on loan from the Collection of David Sneider and Naomi Pollock, celebrates contemporary ceramic art from the Bizen region that preserve a time-honored collaboration of earth, fire, and the artist’s hand. In this article, we learn more about this iconic Japanese craft.

An Age-Old Tradition, Reinvented

In his classic essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) suggested a work of art has elements that no reproduction can capture: a presence in time and space; a unique existence. Perhaps this is why so many great works of ceramic art captivate us—Jun Kaneko’s massive sculptures, featured at the Garden in 2022, were formed by hand, painted by hand, and rolled into the searing hot flames of a Nebraska industrial space by hand. Naoko Fukumaru’s recent kintsugi exhibition at the Garden presented ceramics once broken then rejoined by her steady touch with golden rivulets marking the repairs like lightning across an evening sky. We know this artwork is beautiful but it’s the self-evident care and hours of labor spent that hold our attention, even if we don’t realize it in the moment. This is why Earthen Elegance: The Ceramic Art of Bizen will leave as much of an impression on its viewer as the craftspeople from the rolling hills of Bizen make on their clay.

Earthen Elegance showcases some of Japan’s leading potters presenting expert and contemporary renditions of a more than 800-year-old tradition. Bizen ceramics, named for their place of origin in Okayama Prefecture, are subtle and asymmetric, rustic and textured, and can be shaped into any number of unglazed forms including vases, cups, jugs, or more sculptural and experimental forms. The pieces on display in Portland Japanese Garden’s Pavilion Gallery through June 9 are on loan from the Collection of David Sneider and Naomi Pollock. Sneider, an international lawyer, and Pollock, an architect and author, are a married couple who lived in Japan for 30 years and assembled an extensive amount of ceramics representative of several different traditions and practices. Bizen is a style that stands out to them as particularly special.

“Among the numerous ceramic centers in the country, those with deep historical roots, such as Bizen, hold a special place because they have resuscitated and reinvented age-old traditions,” Sneider shares. “Bizen is not the only historical ceramics center with medieval origins to experience a revival in the 20th century, but in my view the region has produced a particular abundance of ceramic artists who are creating highly original work that is yet grounded in traditional materials and techniques.”

Groundwork

Japanese pottery traces its roots back to an origin in our distant past. The earliest known dates back to at least the Jōmon Period (10,500-300 BCE), named for the jōmon (rope-patterned) earthenware pottery produced  throughout this era and hardened in pit-fires. The fascinating and asymmetrical designs of this Neolithic age would evolve into  different approaches, philosophies, and outputs as ceramic centers  proliferated across the land.

Bizen pottery grew from ancient Sue ware, blue-grey ceremonial stoneware produced alongside the 5^th century Kofun era keyhole-shaped burial mounds.  By the 12^th century, by the end of Japan’s Heian Period (794-1185), Bizen-ware had taken on its distinctive appearance with artisans making general household goods rather than ceremonial vessels. Left unglazed, the various reddish-brown surface effects decorating the ceramics demonstrated the artisans’ burgeoning understanding of how to manipulate the heat and ash within their wood-fired kilns. The natural aesthetic of the resulting ceramic wares grew into particular prominence during the Momoyama Period (1569-1603), a violent stretch of time filled with warfare that also saw Chado, or The Way of Tea emerge as a quintessential Japanese practice. Popularized by the tea masters Murata Shukō  (1423-1502), Takeno Jō’ō Takeno (1502-1555), and Sen no Rikyū (1522-1591), Chadō placed great value in wabi sabi, a fundamental Japanese aesthetic that because it is intuition-based, is difficult to define but is thought to value places or objects that are imperfect, rustic, natural, and marked by the passage of time. Bizen ceramics, which can exemplify these characteristics, became increasingly sought after as the aristocratic class competed to procure the finest examples of humble tea bowls and other related instruments.

Ceramics are a craft that rides the waves of trends like any other artistic endeavor and as Japan moved further into the Edo period (1603-1868), interest began to rise in the more colorfully glazed and embellished Arita ware that sprung up from the porcelain-rich clay of Kyushu. Dr. Herbert Sanders (1909-1988), a respected scholar in ceramics, writes that Bizen ware simultaneously saw creative decline: “At the beginning of the Edo period, the Bizen potters greatly developed their techniques, but the character of their work deteriorated.”

When American gunboats coerced Japan out of isolation and into the Meiji Era (1868-1912), it sparked industrialization at a breakneck speed. As the nation’s daimyo (feudal lords), lost influence,potters lost their patronage. The rough, unglazed ceramic pieces that had embodied the spirit of Japanese tea ceremony did not appeal to a growing foreign market. Like many other careful and methodical Japanese arts, Bizen ceramics lost ground to products made more cheaply and more efficiently by machine. and with it, Bizen ceramics’ standing began to ebb.

But then, a revival.

Linking Back to the Human Heart

Similar to how garden styles like zoki no niwa (represented by the Natural Garden here) were a reaction to Japan’s rapid industrialization, those who still revered traditional craft led a response through art. Sōetsu Yanagi (1869-1961) is credited with leading Mingei, or the folk-art movement of Japan that began in the 1920s. “It seems to me that there is something so basic, so natural in the hand that the urge to utilize its power will always make itself felt,” Yanagi wrote in his classic tome, The Unknown Craftsman. “Moreover, the chief characteristic of handcrafts is that they maintain by their very nature a direct link with the human heart, so that the work always partakes of a human quality. Machine-made things are children of the brain; they are not very human. The more they spread, the less the human being is needed. What seems to be a great advance is also a great step backward; the desire for the natural as opposed to the artificial surely has some basic, unchanging significance.”

In the 1930s, increasing value was placed on practices believed to be inherently Japanese and not a syncretization of multiple Asian outputs. Bizen and other major pottery sites like Shigaraki and Tanba were thought to be uniquely Japanese and once again regained popularity when thought leaders of the era determined the Momoyama period to represent “classical” Japanese ceramics. Further extolling the virtues of Bizen ware were wealthy businessmen who, like aristocrats of centuries past, sought tea instruments steeped in wabi sabi.

Among those responsible for the revival of Momoyama-era Bizen ceramics was Tōyō Kaneshige (1896-1967), a descendant one of the families whose skills were recognized for many centuries. In the 1930s, he began to make classical-style tea wares based on his excavations of ancient Bizen kilns. . Others, like the Isezaki brothers, Jun (b. 1936) and Mitsuru (1934-2011), built anagama, or “cave kilns” resembling the structures their forebearers had used to create work that allowed modern society to connect with those that first gave shape to the style centuries ago. The efforts of potters, scholars, and enthusiasts revitalized Bizen.

A Labor of Love

The sensations of harmony and peace felt at Portland Japanese Garden are the product of 60 years of care. Whether it was procuring just the right stones from the cliffs of Terrebonne in the 1960s or sweeping the last black pine needle from a bed of moss, the efforts of multiple generations is too profound not to be felt by those who take the time to take the Garden in.

This dedication is also apparent from the potters of Bizen. Their craft is a time-consuming process that begins, as all things do, with the land. Potters combined different kinds of local clay depending on what they hoped to create. Then the potter would begin to form their desired shape, their work often the result of years of apprenticeship and decades honing their skills to achieve a particular look and feel to their vessels.

They then place the pieces within the kiln, using other natural elements like wood and straw to draw out specific effects. Loading pieces in specific locations where they can expect distinct results from the proximity to the flame and resulting ash. As the kiln heats up the craftsperson cedes artistic discretion to chemical reactions born in fire. Rice straw placed around the clay becomes molten as its potassium meets the hot temperatures, resulting in reddish hematite micro-crystals where the straw once sat creating a striking hue against the muted colors of the clay. These hidasuki (“scarlet cord”) patterns are  seen in the work of Koichiro Isezaki (the son of Jun Isezaki) and are characteristic of the Bizen aesthetic Whatever kinds of clay or materials are used, the vessel may spend at least two weeks being fired.

The final product never forgets the land it came from. Even the more colorful sangiri work as seen in the exhibited artwork by Shinichi Yokoyama or playful round marks in the botamochi of Shin Isezaki’s piece still have a decidedly earthy tone. “The rough, powerful and unglazed nature of Bizen pottery seems closer to nature than many other Japanese ceramic traditions, and therefore perhaps particularly suited to the Garden as a locale,” Sneider offers.

Now Open Through June 9

Visitors to Earthen Elegance will be able to see remarkable work from famous Bizen ceramicists, including the aforementioned Jun Isezaki, a Living National Treasure of Japan, and by Ryūichi Kakurezaki, one of Japan’s most innovative contemporary sculptors and who was named an Important Intangible Cultural Property of Okayama Prefecture in 2019. “The primary focus of our collection is flower vessels and sculptural, often non-utilitarian, work,” Sneider shares. “We found that over the past decades, Bizen has produced many innovative artists who have strived to incorporate highly original approaches into traditional materials and kiln techniques. The Isezaki family potters and Kakurezaki are but prominent examples. As a result, we discovered many interesting artists whose work we wanted to acquire for the Collection.”

“[The Collection of David Sneider and Naomi Pollock] is encyclopedic, encompassing work from virtually every major ceramics center and tradition, and hundreds of ceramic artists,” Sneider continues. “Bizen work is well represented in the collection. We lived in Japan from 1988 to 2019, and collected Japanese ceramics throughout this time. In addition, I lived in Japan for part of my childhood and at that time visited potters at their kilns with my mother, who later became a dealer in Japanese and Korean art, including contemporary ceramics.”

“I hope that visitors will come away with an appreciation for the tremendous creativity of contemporary Japanese ceramics and for the brilliant way in which Bizen artists have incorporated traditional materials and techniques into highly original and modern works of ceramic art,” Sneider concludes.

Earthen Elegance: The Ceramic Art of Bizen is now open in the Pavilion Gallery through June 9.

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