Listening to Clay – The Brooklyn Rail

Listening to Clay: Conversations with Contemporary Japanese Ceramic Artists
Edited by Alice North, Halsey North, and Louise Allison Court
(Monacelli Press, 2022)

Listening to Clay, recently published in hardcover, which includes sixteen interviews with contemporary Japanese ceramic artists and five interviews with Japanese art dealers, is not a coffee table book. Flipping through it, you won’t find glossy illustrations of teapots, vases and stone sculptures. Instead, as befits an art book that has the word “listening” in its title, it has far more words than images. (Actually, reproductions are conspicuously scarce.) This book is primarily an opportunity for artists to describe their practices.

The participating artists span the last fifty years of ceramic arts in Japan – the oldest artist is Hayashi Yasuo (b. 1928) and the youngest is Kondo Takahiro (b. 1958). The five dealers include a mix of Japanese and American gallerists. All subjects were selected by established collectors of contemporary Japanese ceramics, Alice and Halsey North, and art historian and ceramic scholar Louise Allison Court. “Not a survey or a chronology, this book presents life stories that are personal, everyday, distinctive, and in the voice of the artist himself,” the American trio wrote in the introduction, which also contextualizes the techniques, cultural attitudes toward, and markets for ceramics in Japan through XX century.

The interview questions were tailored to each artist, creating a wide range of responses. Hayashi Yasuo talks about how his World War II-era training as a kamikaze pilot in the pitch black of night was a visual source of inspiration for his later black ceramic work, for example. Mishima Kimio talks about developing ways to print on clay as part of her process to create highly realistic reproductions of trash, such as piles of newspapers and cardboard or soda cans. “I had to invent the technique because no one had done this before,” she explains, before giving an insight into her methods.

Because the conversations were so individualized, no questions were asked throughout. Mishima Kimio was asked, “If you had the time, money and energy to do anything you wanted, what would it be?” It would be interesting to hear different answers to this question from several artists. Another question that would be insightful to hear multiple perspectives on is the one asked of Miwa Ryukisho: “How has Japanese pottery changed in your lifetime?”

But this lack of unifying questions may be part of the book’s general approach, which sidelines the interviewer (and emphasizes the artists/dealers). Interviews are a handful of prompts followed by lengthy responses. It is not clear which of the three interviewers is asking the questions, as their identities have not been noted. And several interviews have been edited and condensed from multiple conversations held between 2007 and today.

Although the book is dominated by artists’ voices, the ones readers are destined to hear are pre-selected with some bias. Court and Norths pass the mic, but only to artists with whom they have long-standing friendships and whom Norths has personally assembled. “The three authors chose artists they knew well,” writes in the foreword Monika Binchik, associate curator of Japanese decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum (where the Norths have donated several works). This makes one wonder about artists the authors did not know well, who therefore never made it into this authoritative textbook-sized volume. Sometimes Listening to Clay reads like a kind of primary source reference accompanying the North’s collection.

After the interviews, Listening to Clay includes an informative glossary of terms and people, plus a useful index, making it suitable for scholars who may wish to use these interviews as a research tool. One of the artists, Miyashita Zenji, died a few years after the interview, making this posthumous publication of his words a unique resource. When asked how he came to layer colored clay, a hallmark of his work, Miyashita Zenji said that “with ceramics you have to learn to break the rules. If you don’t, you can’t achieve work that’s distinctive.”

Listening to Clay will appeal to readers with an interest in understanding contemporary Japanese ceramics beyond the surface-level visual joy of it. (But if you’re someone who likes and needs illustrations, this book might make you look for clay.)