Porcelain Sculpture "Taimitsu no To" by Rikichi MIYANAGA

A tall porcelain sculpture rising to a sharp apex in the silhouette of a narrow, leaning triangle. The form is folded along a central angle, so that two ribbed planes meet in a projecting edge. Parallel raised ridges rise upright from the base, turn at an angle halfway up and climb in stepped chevrons towards the point. On the broad face they nest as concentric triangles, recalling the stacked eaves of a temple roof. A glossy pale blue-green glaze covers the whole, pooling slightly deeper in the channels between the ridges. The title, Taimitsu no To (Pagoda of Tendai Esotericism), refers to Taimitsu, the esoteric Buddhism of the Tendai school. With the original tomobako, the lid inscribed with the title and "made in 1987", signed Miyanaga Rikichi saku and sealed. A paper label beneath the piece repeats the title, date and name.

MIYANAGA Rikichi (born 1935), who has worked since 1999 under the hereditary name Miyanaga Tozan III, is the third head of the Miyanaga Tozan kiln in Kyoto, a ceramic house long celebrated for its celadon. The son of Miyanaga Tozan II, he trained as a sculptor rather than in the family workshop. He graduated from the sculpture department of Kyoto City University of Arts in 1958, where he studied under the ceramic sculptor Tsuji Shindo, and continued his studies at the Art Students League in New York. In 1970 he joined Sodeisha, the Kyoto avant-garde group founded in 1948 that freed clay from function and established ceramic sculpture as an art form in its own right. He belongs to its second generation, who brought the movement to maturity in the 1970s. His porcelain sculptures, built from folded planes, ridged surfaces and triangular volumes under pale blue glazes, join the discipline of his sculptural training to the glaze tradition of his family. In 1992 he published the monograph Yakimono - Claywork: The Artistic World of Rikichi Miyanaga. In 1995 his work was shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, in Japanese Studio Crafts: Tradition and the Avant-Garde. His succession to the name Tozan III in 1999 was marked by the exhibition Three Generations of Tozan at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. His work is held by the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, the National Crafts Museum, Tokyo, the Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Compare:

• MIYANAGA Rikichi, "Temple Roof", porcelain with pale blue glaze, 1987, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (FE.6:1, 2-1991); illustrated in Rupert Faulkner, Japanese Studio Crafts: Tradition and the Avant-Garde, London, 1995, pl. 28
• MIYANAGA Rikichi, "Taimitsu no Yane" (Roof of Tendai Esotericism), porcelain, Wakayama Prefectural Museum of Modern Art
• MIYANAGA Rikichi, "Bell Tower", porcelain, illustrated in Miyanaga Rikichi, Yakimono – Claywork: The Artistic World of Rikichi Miyanaga, Tokyo and Osaka: Shinshindo Shuppan, 1992, pl. 74

Condition: Excellent; no chips, cracks or restorations visible; three unglazed kiln-support marks to the underside with minor firing residue, inherent to manufacture.