Plate — Kodai Ujiie
Kodai Ujiie
Ceramic
Reference JPN-PLT-007
About the work
Kodai Ujiie has described how a plate can become a landscape — in this piece, an irregular, fractured surface pushes the familiar flat plate form toward something closer to terrain, its cracks and raised sections read as geography rather than decoration.
Detail
This plate takes up a question central to Kodai Ujiie's practice: what happens when a ceramic surface is no longer expected to remain perfect? Rather than resolving into the flat, symmetrical geometry usually associated with a plate, the surface here is allowed to distort, expand and partially collapse, so that traditional ceramic categories remain present in the work without defining its limits — in Ujiie's own words, a plate can become a landscape, a crack can become a line, a surface can become a body. Colour collides across the piece and unstable glaze settles unevenly into the resulting fractures, producing a surface that can read as skin, mineral deposit or dried earth depending on the angle and light. The effect positions the work between vessel, sculpture and material event: a plate that keeps enough of its original category to be recognisable, while its fractured, landscape-like surface pulls attention toward a geological rather than domestic reading of the object.
About the series
Ujiie's ceramics are positioned between vessel, sculpture and material event — traditional categories like the plate remain visible in the work, but they no longer define where the piece's meaning actually sits.
