Ken Matsuzaki

Ken Matsuzaki was born in Tokyo in 1950 and studied ceramics at Tamagawa University's Department of Art, graduating in 1972. He then completed a five-year apprenticeship under Tatsuzo Shimaoka in Mashiko, a town closely associated with Japan's twentieth-century mingei, or folk-craft, movement. In 1977 he established his own kiln, Yuushin Gama, and has worked independently in Mashiko ever since. His practice sits within the mingei tradition while remaining distinctly contemporary. He fires in both wood-burning and gas kilns, working across Oribe, Shino, Kiseto and yohen glazes, and pursues the ash-glaze effects and kiln-born transformations that make each firing unrepeatable. His work is shaped by that process rather than smoothed over, giving each piece its own record of heat, ash and chance. His ceramics are held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others, and he has been represented internationally, including by Pucker Gallery, since 2001.