Plate — Kodai Ujiie
Kodai Ujiie
Ceramic
Reference JPN-PLT-003
About the work
In Kodai Ujiie's ceramics, the plate's surface becomes an active field of fracture rather than a flat, neutral ground. Cracks spread, colours collide and unstable glaze structures are left visible rather than concealed, giving this piece its distinctive movement and tension.
Detail
This plate is part of Kodai Ujiie's practice of transforming the ceramic surface into an active field of fracture, colour and material change. Rather than treating cracks, irregular edges and unstable glaze as flaws to correct, Ujiie allows them to spread and collide across the surface, so they become central to how the piece acquires movement, tension and a distinctly sculptural presence. The resulting surface can suggest skin, mineral deposits, dried earth or biological tissue — appearing fragile and resilient at once, as though the piece has been damaged, repaired and allowed to keep growing. Ujiie's documented practice includes vividly coloured, abstract ceramics with strongly crazed glaze surfaces, sometimes incorporating lacquer-based interventions related to the Japanese tradition of kintsugi, and recent exhibitions have focused increasingly on exactly this territory of skin, body, irregularity and transformation. Traditional ceramic categories remain present in the work but no longer define its limits — in Ujiie's own account, a plate can become a landscape.
About the series
Ujiie does not treat existence as a completed state but as a continuous process of change — cracks, colour collisions and distorted structures are read not as damage but as the ongoing identity of the object.
