Plate — Kodai Ujiie
Kodai Ujiie
Ceramic
Reference JPN-PLT-005
About the work
This plate by Kodai Ujiie draws on lacquer-based interventions related to the Japanese tradition of kintsugi, incorporated into a strongly crazed, vividly coloured glaze surface — repair and transformation folded directly into the making of the object rather than added afterward.
Detail
This plate belongs to Kodai Ujiie's documented practice of vividly coloured, abstract ceramics with strongly crazed glaze surfaces, in which the artist sometimes incorporates lacquer-based techniques related to the Japanese tradition of kintsugi directly into the making of the object. Rather than concealing cracks and irregular glaze structures as faults, Ujiie treats them as central material — the piece's identity is built from fracture, colour collision and an unstable glaze that is allowed to spread and settle unevenly across the surface. That process gives the ceramic a quality closer to skin, mineral deposit or dried earth than to a conventionally finished plate, appearing simultaneously fragile and resilient, as though it had already undergone damage, repair and continued growth by the time it reached its final form. Ujiie's recent exhibitions have increasingly focused on this exact territory — skin, body, irregularity and transformation — treating a familiar ceramic category like the plate as raw material for an ongoing process rather than a fixed, finished shape.
About the series
Cracks are not corrected in Ujiie's practice but allowed to spread — the artist has spoken of existence not as a completed state but as a continuous process of change, and that idea is built into the surface itself.
