White Porcelain Sculptural Vessel — Tsubusa Kato
Tsubusa Kato
Porcelain with white to pale-blue glaze
Reference JPN-BRK-003
About the work
A sculptural porcelain vessel by Tsubusa Kato, defined by a vertically faceted body and an irregular, fractured opening. Its restrained white and pale-blue glazed surface shifts with the light, while the sharply disrupted upper edge introduces tension and movement into an otherwise controlled form.
Detail
This sculptural porcelain vessel reflects Tsubusa Kato's distinctive approach to contemporary Japanese ceramics, in which precision and disruption exist within the same form. The body rises vertically through broad, sharply defined planes, and rather than resolving into a conventional rim, the upper section appears split, cut and partially opened, creating a deliberately unstable boundary between the exterior and the hollow interior. A luminous white to pale-blue glaze softens the severity of that geometry: light travels across the polished surface and gathers subtly within its recesses and folds, emphasizing changes in volume that are difficult to read from a single viewpoint. Kato's ceramic practice is known for physically carving and cutting forms, using the pressure and fragmentation generated during that process as part of the finished work rather than concealing it — refinement and force combine here to give porcelain an unexpectedly sharp, dynamic presence, controlled at the base and abruptly interrupted at the crown.
About the series
The work is built around a tension between control and rupture — a clean porcelain body suggesting precision and restraint, interrupted by a fractured upper opening that keeps the object simultaneously constructed and broken, stable and in motion.