Saishoku Bizen Guinomi — Landscape and Sun — No. 2
Abe Anjin
Bizen stoneware with kiln effects, coloured decoration and gold
Reference JPN-HIS-008
About the work
A second Saishoku Bizen sake cup from the same landscape-and-sun composition, this piece keeps the dark Bizen body as the ground for a deliberately primitive scene — gold, blue, brown and red reduced to a handful of forceful marks rather than an illusionistic view.
Detail
This guinomi shares its landscape-and-sun composition with a sibling piece in Abe Anjin's Saishoku Bizen group, though each surface is worked individually across the dark Bizen body. Blocks of gold, blue, brown and red suggest a condensed landscape — earth or mountain, sky and sun reduced to a small number of forceful visual elements — deliberately primitive and direct rather than illusionistic. Abe preserves the physical reality of the ceramic body beneath that composition: irregular texture, traces of firing and changes in the underlying clay remain visible through and around the coloured areas, so the kiln's own history is never fully covered by the painted intervention. The vessel keeps its identity as a functional sake cup even as its small surface comes to operate like an independent abstract painting, the ancient material presence of Bizen ware and a highly contemporary pictorial language held together on the same compact form.
About the series
Rather than creating an illusionistic landscape, Abe keeps the composition deliberately primitive and direct, so the ceramic surface and the painted intervention remain in visible, active tension rather than one dissolving into the other.
