Kazunori Hamana, Yuji Ueda, and Otani Workshop Ceramics Show at Blum & Poe

This past week I went to the stunning ceramics exhibition at Blum & Poe.  It featured the work of Japanese ceramicists Kazunori Hamana, Yuji Ueda, and Otani Workshop.  The exhibition was organized and curated by Takashi Murakami.  The pieces represented a wide range of forms, designs, and materials. The asethetic was wabi sabi.....the quintessential Japanese aesthetic.    It is the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.  It is the beauty of things modest and humble.  An idea that I have come to appreciate.  When I first started ceramics I would always try to make things perfectly and worry too much about imperfections.  It wasn't until I took a workshop from Dimitri Hadzi and started to do Raku that I began to appreciate this aesthetic.  And lately, the beauty of this aesthetic was reinforced in me when clients  enjoyed the beauty in some of my pieces that I thought were too imperfect.

Here are pics from the show.