Kodai Ujiie

Kodai Ujiie (b. 1990, Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture) is a Japanese ceramic artist based in Tajimi, Gifu Prefecture. He holds a BFA (2013) and MFA (2015) from Tohoku University of Art and Design. His work sits between vessel and sculpture, built in porcelain and stoneware and marked by purposeful cracks (kannyū), fissured glaze surfaces, and lacquer repair drawn from kintsugi technique. Ujiie treats breakage and mending as part of the finished object rather than a flaw to conceal, exploring rupture, repair and the vitality of imperfection in pieces that reference traditional Japanese pottery styles including Oribe, Karatsu and Shino. His work has been shown at Ippodo Gallery (New York), Bernheim Gallery (Zurich), The Stratford Gallery (UK), Tosei Kyoto Gallery, Nihonbashi Takashimaya (Tokyo) and Galeria Mascota (Mexico City), and is held in the collection of the Miyagi Prefectural Jun Sugimura Museum of Art. At MPHEAS.ART, his sculptural Anatomy of Earth and the Liquid Memory of Clay series and plate works carry the same language of compression, fracture and accumulation into stoneware built and glazed by hand.