Single Flower Vase by Shigekazu NAGAE

NAGAE Shigekazu was born in 1953 in Seto, Aichi Prefecture, one of Japan's oldest ceramic centres, and completed the advanced ceramics course at the Aichi Prefectural Seto Ceramics High School in 1974. His work is built on slip-casting, a method developed for the industrial production of porcelain, in which the warping of thin cast walls during firing was traditionally treated as a flaw. Nagae turned that distortion into his central means of expression. He developed his own casting technique and fires very thin porcelain forms at high temperature, allowing them to bend and drape under their own weight in the kiln. The resulting curves are guided by the artist but completed by the fire.

His work has received the Grand Prize at the Chunichi International Ceramic Art Exhibition in 1979 and again in 1986. He also won the Grand Prize at the Japan Ceramic Art Exhibition in 1997, and in 1998 he took both the Grand Prix at the Triennale de la Porcelaine in Nyon, Switzerland, and the Grand Prize in the ceramics division of the International Ceramics Competition Mino. He has received the Aichi Prefecture Art and Culture Award and has taught as a lecturer at Bunsei University of Art. His work is held by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Musée national de Céramique, Sèvres, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others.