Manga Oribe — Bowl — Fuminori Fukami
Fuminori Fukami
Manga Oribe · Glazed stoneware, Oribe-type glazes with painted decoration
Reference JPN-SAM-007
About the work
This bowl from Fuminori Fukami's Manga Oribe uses its curved, open form to fragment the manga-derived imagery painted across it — no single viewpoint shows the whole picture, so the piece asks to be turned in the hand to be read in full.
Detail
As a bowl within Fuminori Fukami's Manga Oribe, this work makes particular use of a form built around a single continuous curve and an open interior. Fukami paints imagery sourced from manga and ukiyo-e — Hokusai Manga and prints connected to artists such as Utagawa Kuniyoshi among them — directly onto the irregular Oribe-glazed surface, and because the bowl's body curves continuously around its opening, no figure can be seen whole from one angle: it bends around the rim, disappears where the form turns, or is interrupted by a fold in the glaze. The viewer has to physically move around, or rotate, the bowl to complete the image, turning a normally passive act of looking into something closer to reading a sequence. Saturated green and orange Oribe glaze and confident black line carry that imagery, while the bowl's practical opening — the same opening used to hold food or drink — becomes the very thing that breaks the picture apart and requires movement to resolve it, an especially direct version of the tension Fukami builds across the wider series.
About the series
Fukami has pointed to exactly this — the impossibility of reproducing a figure perfectly on a curved ceramic surface — as central to what makes the process interesting, and an open bowl form makes that curvature, and the movement it demands of the viewer, especially pronounced.
