This set of five stacking dishes reflects the celebrated maker Tsuji Kyo’s sensitivity to form and use. It has a deep, rounded shape with triangular sections removed at three points, forming gentle inward cusps. The glaze covers nearly the entire surface, leaving a circular area at the interior base unglazed, subtly revealing the clay body.

Tsuji Kyo was among the few pioneering women who entered and excelled in the male-dominated, labor-intensive world of ceramic art. She graduated in 1952 from a women’s college of fine arts, where she majored in Western painting. At the time, educational opportunities for women were largely limited to music, literature, and Western-style painting, reflecting expectations that they become modern housewives.

By 1961, her ceramic works were already exhibited at the prestigious Mitsukoshi Nihonbashi department store, indicating that she had established her artistic voice early. To avoid gender bias in competitions, she changed her name from Kyoko to Kyo.

A mother of four, she sustained a rigorous artistic practice alongside family life. In 1996, she traveled to New York for a solo exhibition at Dai Ichi Arts. Years later, her daughter, Tsuji Kei, now an accomplished artist, continued that legacy, carrying forward a resonant artistic voice. Working primarily with gritty Shigaraki clay and wood-firing outside metropolitan Tokyo, Tsuji Kyo created functional objects rooted in an expressive vocabulary of yakishime (wood fired ceramics) and glazed vessels, elevating the status of vessels to high art.