Those of us who have watched Yasuhiro Kohara's career with mounting enthusiasm found our interest amply rewarded at the artist's recent show at Gallery Dai Ichi Arts in New York City. Kohara has burst forth exuberantly with a collection of work that exhibits a new maturity and confidence. Born in Shigaraki in 1954, Kohara says that he is utterly self-taught, in the sense that he had no formal schooling in ceramic art, and he apprenticed to no master. However, as Shigaraki is one of the six ancient kiln sites of Japan and today home to hundreds of potters, clay is, in a sense, in his blood, and his aesthetic sense and technique have undoubtedly been shaped by the strong Shigaraki tradition and challenged by the competitive atmosphere.

   
Click pictures above for that image and more of each work

First, of course, there is the gorgeous, luscious, Shigaraki clay - a dense, grainy clay that looks like shortbread dough and fires to a toasty buff. It is an ideal foil for the washes and rivulets of natural ash glaze, which sheets some surfaces in transparent mustard yellow and dark gray and collects in pools of crisp, fresh spring green. The glaze is very melted, very flowing, with a muted, but impressive, color spectrum, in some pieces ranging from champagne to amber to seafoam green.

Kohara works in a variety of forms. Among those displayed in the current show are a hanging vase in the so-called "traveler's pillow" shape; a squat square box; plates, and a basket, as well as a tea bowl and large vase. In these works the artist pulls off a tour de force, handling thick, muscular hunks of clay with a lightness and dynamic lyricism that belies the weight and heft of the material. The handle on his "Shigaraki Basket" spans a full 16 inches with effortless grace. It is perhaps no great surprise that the mountainous vistas of Shigaraki would find expression in his work, which is evocative of volcanic forces, waterfalls, pristine pools. The great huge scoop of his Basket has the dignity of a survivor...warped and twisted as though it has endured great, seismic stresses, and emerged battle-scarred and triumphant. His pieces have a sculptural presence, a monumental physicality, expressed, compressed, in a small size. Kohara's "Shigaraki Box", described by one observer as a "linebacker," is the essence of "box": square, squat, protective...almost defensive or defiant. The surface calls to mind the stone blocks of ancient castle walls, or the geologic strata of a seaside cliff. Decoration is minimal and deliberately naive. The bold XXXXXs inscribed on the shoulder of a flower container have Momoyama antecedents.

One is tempted to judge Kohara a romantic. Just as the poet found the whole world in a grain of sand, so one can find the flow of life force in a Kohara tea bowl. His rough-hewn plates are delicately contemplative, the chalk-white of the clay (protected from fire and ash) encircled by glaze, forming a sort of "enso" the Buddhist circle of emptiness. However, the artist himself denies any emotive or spiritual intention, stating firmly "No philosophy." Kohara judges his pieces strictly in formal terms and is willing to take some time to point out how a well-situated drip is carefully balanced by a corresponding rivulet, now captured and frozen in time. What appears accidental, is in fact carefully planned, and Kohara takes pains to ensure that he controls, to the greatest extent possible, what happens in the kiln, on occasion using a long metal probe to move pieces in the wood-burning kiln even at the height of the firing. The glaze, of course, is created by the natural process of flying ash landing and melting on the clay surfaces.

While Kohara claims to have no teacher, he is not without influences. This is no naif. He meets nearly every day over coffee or tea with neighboring artists Michio Furukata, and Naokata Ueda. Shunsai Takahashi has been his inspiration for how to be true to the calling to be an artist, never settling, always looking for something new. Western artists he finds interesting include Miro (the paintings, not the ceramics) for his use of negative space, Picasso and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

We are accustomed to artists working in meticulous additive or, in the case of minimalists, reductionist approaches, so one might wonder where the craft or mastery is in works with such spontaneity and freedom. The craft is in the process, and a control of "accident" as personal and as insistent as Jackson Pollack's. Kohara is an artist for whom nothing is taken for granted, nothing is routine, yet who wisely knows when to leave well enough alone. He never falls into the temptation to overwork the clay, thus the shapes have the freshness and spontaneity, the "just this" of a work of nature. And, like nature, they pierce our hearts.

Patricia Pelehach is Vice President of MOCA (Museum of Ceramic Art) Senior Director of Development at New York University, Potter, and collector.