In the retreat near Isumi, Kazunori Hamana created humble and majestic ceramic vessels that evoke the world around him.
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In an Edo-era farmhouse near the seaside town of Isumi, two hours’ drive southeast of Tokyo, soft light shines on seven large round clay containers through paper-wood lattice doors; their pale surfaces are on the building’s The wooden pillars and beams are shining brightly, and with the passage of time, these wooden pillars and beams have been blackened by the smoke from the open hearth. These ships are the only residents of this traditional building or kominka with more than 200 years of history. On the shabby tatami in the front hall, there is a slanted white sheet with slight dents like fish scales. A pair of radishes, a pair of indigo polka dots coated with dripping water, and a pair of thick black-brown bands, seemed to stare out the window together. They are handmade from gray-white clay from Shiga Prefecture, Japan. They are the work of 51-year-old artist Kazunori Hamana, who used this once magnificent residence as an exhibition space. His works have been exhibited in famous galleries, including Blum & Poe in Los Angeles and New York, but he referred to them simply as tsubo, a term that implies practical clay pots containing homemade kimchi in his grandmother’s kitchen. However, compared to these familiar objects, Hamana's pingzi immediately appeared majestic—most of them were close to 30 inches in size—and the delicate, weathered and cracked surfaces echoed their crumbling fences and painted walls.
Another buyer may have demolished this 1,000-square-foot building with a tin-covered thatched roof to build a new house on site, but Hamana bought it in 2016 for the price of the land on which it is located because He wants to protect it. "This is part of my collection," he said, referring to the objects around him, and it feels related to human history: 5th century pottery from Korea and Japan, ceramics made by friends, and indigo boro repaired before the 20th century. Clothes found at the flea market. His collection also includes a modern beach house nearby, with a sand-colored concrete exterior wall, where he built his ping, and fished by casting nets in the swells of the house’s seawall; and A medium two-story mid-century farmhouse in the northern valley, where he burned his own work in the old warehouse, planted rice on the quarter-acre rice field of the property, and lived and cooperated with the artist Yukiko Kuroda , 52 years old. He commutes between his three houses on a motorcycle or a kei van (a cheap, compact means of transportation that Japanese farmers like), all of which are within 15 minutes, and use this time to meditate. He said that his art is not the ships he sculpted, but the process of examining himself while shaping them, and the process of consciously coexisting with nature on the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
Most of the morning, he would wake up in the first light and cook the brown rice needed for the day. In warm months, he does farm work, and in winter, he goes directly to the studio on the beach. Before dark, he returned to the farmhouse, prepared local fish and vegetables for dinner, heated the family’s wood-burning bathtub—sometimes using waste from an old house that was being demolished nearby—and then went to bed before 8 pm. Invited, he said: "I want to tell people this way of life."
HAMANA reached this place through a winding road. Although his parents were obsessed with his early growth and interest in making things, he described himself as the black sheep of the descendants of the nobility, and they were more willing to become doctors or lawyers. At the age of 6, he raised two chickens in the garden of his childhood home near Osaka. He liked stories about country life, such as the folktales depicted in the animated TV series "Japanese Manga Nippon Mukosaka" (1975-94). Inspired by this play, he used his grandfather’s tools and waste wood to build the Ksitigarbha, a small stone statue of Bodhisattva made by anonymous craftsmen to protect visitors on rural roads and woodland trails-in his opinion, they represent An isolated country life. In the 1970s, in the surrounding area of Osaka, Hamana was often forced to enter due to poor air quality.
At the age of 15, he was enrolled in an agricultural high school in Hyogo prefecture on the waterfront of Japan. Three years later, he went to Northern California Humboldt State University to study for a degree in environmental studies. Obsessed with American fashion and 80s movies, such as "Back to the Future", he dreamed of surfers and girls in bikinis on the beach; the cold north coast was shocking, and he transferred to a community college in San Diego. In the film class, he watched the movies of Akira Kurosawa and Ozu Yasujiro, then smiled and recalled: "I don't know anything about Japan.'Wabishen, what is that?'"
Out of this new curiosity about his country, he returned to his home, went to parties in his 20s and sold the vintage jeans and sneakers he had collected since high school. He said that clothing like Levi's 501 is more than just fashion: "They are culture, history." He went to Tokyo and sold clothes at a flea market until 1994 when he opened his own antique shop Blues in Harajuku. In the following years, he regularly went to the United States to purchase second-hand Nike and denim. The shop was widely known; he bought himself a Ferrari and a Porsche. But when business slowed and the brilliance of Tokyo's nightlife began to fade, he began to look for places near the ocean and mountains.
In 1998, he found a piece of land for sale on a dead end by the sea in Isumi, and built a compact beach house three years later. After the divorce, he moved to the coast full-time in 2008, where he raised his daughter. He has always liked playing with clay, and now he is seriously experimenting with this medium, making his first tsubo in Isumi's community center course. His classmates, mostly old people, wonder: Why can't he make some small and polite things, such as vases or plates? But he was interested in simpler forms—and what would happen if he made them bigger. In his home, he installed a kiln large enough to burn 25-inch wide bricks. Later, in the farmhouse he bought in 2018, he installed 30- and 40-inch kilns.
When they were created, Tsubasa and Hamana walked through his three houses. On the second floor of the beach house, he built each one by hand on the dining table in four to five days. The waves hit the seawall, which is under steep weeds-thin calamus (Japanese pampas grass), mugwort, and wild hydrangea. Hamana didn't plan the shape of the container until the beginning, or how he would draw it, instead relying on intuition and contingency. "If I think too much, it will become design or craftsmanship," he said.
Next, he transported Ping to the farmhouse where he and Kuroda lived to fire them. Sometimes, on the way down the narrow stairs of the beach property, he accidentally broke one, and Kuroda, who left a career in graphic design, worked with her hands to transform the broken ship with kintsugi, a type of connected pottery or lacquerware Fragmented traditional craft paint (lacquer made from tree sap) is usually sprinkled with gold, silver or platinum powder. Kuroda uses tin instead, and sometimes even urushi alone to seal the cracks, and uses shiny medallions cut from the inside of aluminum paint pipes to increase the cracks, or uses the rusty barbed wire that the couple found on the beach .
Today, Hamana's works have appeared in exhibitions curated by Takashi Murakami and are owned by collectors all over the world, but he is ambivalent about himself as an artist. He said that Ping is not as intimidating or exclusive as many contemporary art. On the contrary, it is approachable: "People think it is a vessel or vase, not a sculpture." But when he creates a work as wide as the trunk of an old tree—his largest work is one yard wide—it From a functional container to something that stimulates contemplation. "It's very similar to seeing someone you don't know," he said: The contents are invisible, and you want to know what's in the container.
Hannah Kirshner is the author of "Water, Wood, and Wild Things: Learning Crafts and Farming in a Japanese Mountain Castle".