Manga Oribe — Fuminori Fukami
Fuminori Fukami
Manga Oribe · Glazed stoneware, Oribe-type glazes with painted decoration
Reference JPN-SAM-003
About the work
Fuminori Fukami's Manga Oribe brings manga and ukiyo-e imagery into direct contact with centuries-old Oribe ceramic tradition. Irregular form, saturated green and orange glaze and hand-rendered black graphic lines turn this ceramic object into a compact, three-dimensional narrative image.
Detail
This work belongs to Fuminori Fukami's Manga Oribe, a series the artist developed by transferring imagery drawn from Hokusai Manga, ukiyo-e prints associated with artists such as Utagawa Kuniyoshi, and other personally selected sources onto ceramic vessels rooted in the historic Oribe tradition. Fukami coined the terms Manga Oribe and, for its more explicit variant, Shunga Oribe, treating tradition and contemporary visual culture not as opposites but as languages that can share a single ceramic surface. The underlying vocabulary remains Oribe — irregular form, strong colour, graphic contrast and an acceptance of distortion as an expressive quality — onto which Fukami layers drawing and figurative imagery in black line and saturated glaze. Because the ceramic body is curved, no image can be read from a single viewpoint; a figure bends around the form, disappears at an edge, or is interrupted by glaze, and the viewer has to move around the object to complete it. The historical ceramic object never disappears beneath the picture: glaze, clay, foot and rim remain equally present, so the work operates simultaneously as pottery, illustration and contemporary visual culture.
About the series
Fukami has identified the vessel's curvature — and the resulting inability to reproduce a figure perfectly on a ceramic surface — as central to what makes the Manga Oribe process interesting, a continuation of Japanese ceramic history achieved through collision rather than imitation.
