"Simple/Complex" New Work by Hideaki Miyamura

My father was an architect who designed and built typical Japanese houses around Niigata, where I was born. As a child, I was surrounded by piles of drawings and drafting, and I was always looking through my father’s architectural magazines with great interest. Later, my older brother studied to become an architect and was specifically drawn to the mid-century modern style of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose sense of harmony with his environment has also been inspiring to me. When my brother was in graduate school, I would help him with his ideas and drawings, even though I was still in high school. I remember he would order architectural magazines from the United States, France, and other countries and I would get lost looking at the designs contained in those pages. Among the pieces I have created over the past few years is a new body of work that I call the Architectural Series. I have always been drawn to the mindful approach, simplicity, and spiritual experience of contemporary architects like Philip Johnson, Arata Isozaki, and Tadao Ando. Over ten years ago, I created a series of porcelain towers called Buildings that, like Ando’s concrete structures, seemed to defy logic with their sense of weightlessness. Just as an architect must design within the confines of what is structurally possible, the ceramic artist is constrained by the limits of their technical ability and the physical capacity of the materials. You have to be able to build it. In both architecture and ceramics, the challenge is both aesthetic and substantive. Ando once said that he thought “architecture becomes interesting when it has a double character, that is, when it is as simple as possible, but at the same time as complex as possible.” When I began the Architectural Series, the top and bottom portions of the first piece sat in my studio for three years while I pondered and experimented with different ways of connecting them. I tried materials like glass and metal but neither felt right. I looked through magazines. I finally landed on the idea that the supportive, middle portion could be an assembly of windows made from glazed porcelain squares. Jar with Gold Windows (HM713; cover) feels akin to Ando’s philosophies and design, playing on ideas of spatial circulation, light, and oneness with the natural world. The interconnected forms are quite fun to make and laborious to achieve, but their seeming simplicity gives them a sense of quiet and ease. The glaze is elegantly organic, and through that I try to express a connection to the spirit and beauty of nature. It took many years until I was able to build an architectural piece that resonated with my artistic vision but was also structurally sound. Now, I am excited to make more pieces in this vein, and to include more of the traditional shapes and glazes for which I am known. —Hideaki Miyamura

Hideaki Miyamura was born in 1955 in Niigata, Japan, and traveled to the United States to study art history at Western Michigan University. In 1987, after college, he returned to Japan to pursue his interest in ceramics as an apprentice with master potter Shurei Miura in Yamanashi. Stemming from his interest in rare ancient Chinese tea bowl glazes, Miyamura seeks to create glazes that have a three-dimensional quality and convey purity and peacefulness. His vessels are pristine, disarmingly simple, contemplative objects whose finishes reflect the panoply of the natural world— geologic phenomena, star-filled nights, undulating ocean waves, and fiery sunsets. His work is included in numerous public collections, including the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

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