Masaomi Yasunaga at ICA Miami

Yasunaga works in an experimental, highly personal technique. In a very real sense, his vessels are made out of glaze instead of traditional clay. He mixes a thick paste of frits and minerals, then hand-builds the form from that mixture. But since a piece like that would normally collapse and melt in the kiln, he packs it in crushed stone to hold the shape. Some stones end up fused into the body, others leave impressions. The mixtures crack, shed, and blister, with edges that can char and darken. It’s a method that turns unpredictability into a true collaborator.

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A ceramic vessel is about as familiar a human object as it gets. But it's not ceramics, and not a vessel in a classic sense: Yasunaga’s works reverse the usual logic. What’s typically a coating in ceramics becomes the structure itself. Something that belongs to use, becomes purely for looking. They keep the memory of a vessel, but refuse to behave like one.

So why even insist on the vessel at all? Why not abandon that reference and make sculpture with no obligation to function? We think it’s because that faint outline of usefulness is the pressure point. The archetype of the vessel nudges your attention to the idea that utility isn’t the main measure. Why do we still feel compelled to ask what everything around us is for? Can the value sit in the process, the approach, and the meaning, more than in the object as a tool?

Even the way the finished piece is “excavated” feels almost mystical. You never fully know what will emerge from that mound of stone. The objects read as if they were uncovered rather than made. In that process, the artist becomes less a controller and more a mediator between the physical events of the firing and the original artistic intention. You set the conditions, choose the firing cycle, and what comes out carries a natural, almost “geological” kind of beauty. That’s what resonates with us so deeply. We believe it’s in this collaboration — intention-meeting-chance-meeting-meaning — that something real happens, and a more genuine kind of beauty appears.