Masaomi Yasunaga Pushes the Limits of Ceramics, One Sculpture at a Time

“When my grandmother died and her body was cremated, I wanted to make something to express and materialize my private thoughts and feelings,” says the Japanese artist Masaomi Yasunaga, while holding a small, delicate white urn. “As a ceramic artist, I wanted to share something with other people, so I decided to take some ashes back to the studio. I mixed them with glaze and made 20 of these to pass on to my family members.”

Yasunaga and I are virtually touring the vast studio he bought five years ago in Mie prefecture, a region of central Japan. Set against a postcard-perfect backdrop, the former wooden materials factory overlooks a valley of rice fields that stretch in narrow strips toward a mountain range. An easy eight-minute drive from his home, Yasunaga usually returns to the studio after supper with his family to continue work until midnight. “When I get tired, I just come outside and sit here and admire the view,” he says, gazing at the pastoral landscape. “The work of pottery is creation through the force of nature. It is not something I can do on my own. It is made in collaboration with nature.”

To call Yasunaga a ceramist challenges the very definition of the age-old medium. Known for avant-garde vessels that look magnificently barnacled and bio-eroded, the artist largely forgoes clay. Instead, Yasunaga often uses glaze as his primary substance, combining it with rocks, silver leaf, copper, and minerals. He submerges these objects in sand or soil to preserve their shape during kiln firing; after they have cooled, he painstakingly removes the crusted form from its casing. The result is radically contemporary—the pieces seem excavated from the lunar surface or fossil reefs.

“There is a paradoxical aspect to it,” explains Alex Gartenfeld, the director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. “It’s like making a painting without paint, but more complicated—more like a bronze sculpture without bronze.” Gartenfeld has curated the artist’s first major U.S. museum exhibition, Masaomi Yasunaga: Traces of Memory, which opened this week at the ICA to coincide with Art Basel Miami Beach. On view through March 22, the show consists of 14 pieces made from 2020 to 2024, alongside a larger, site-specific installation in which a trio of artifacts is arranged on a bed of crushed rock.

Recalling his childhood in Osaka, Yasunaga, tells me that he “didn’t know there was such a thing as an artist in the world” and that “he wasn’t particularly interested in art,” but spent time sewing and building tables in his room. It wasn’t until his final year of high school, during an open campus day at Osaka Sangyo University, that he found his calling. “I saw work by Satoru Hoshino and from that moment I wanted to be a ceramic artist,” says Yasunaga. Hoshina, who would become his teacher, was a member of the Sodeisha group— which translates to “crawling through Mud Association.” Founded in mid-century Kyoto, the revolutionary artistic movement broke from the Mingei, folk-craft and traditional tea ceremony aesthetic of centuries past, by celebrating sculptural rather than functional aspects of pottery.

Even today, the historic debate of whether ceramics count as fine art rages on. “I’m not really attached to the categories that people make,” says Yasunaga. “Just as countries don’t really have clear boundaries, there is no clear boundary between ceramicists or artists, sculptures or craft.” In fact, he likens such arbitrary divisions to his own unique twist on the medium. “There is no particular boundary between materials such as clay or glaze,” he continues. “I think of them as a gradation of different materials that melt in a kiln.”

Over time, Yasunaga has steadily upscaled his creations. “The first ceramic work that impressed me by Mr. Hoshino was as big as a person,” recalls Yasunaga. “When newborn chicks first see an object, they tend to think that it's their parent. To me, that is what ceramic art has to be, because that’s the first thing I saw.”

But the 43-year-old quickly adds, “when I was younger, I felt I didn’t really have the skills and techniques and artistic sense required to make large-scale works. Now, I feel I can challenge myself to try new things.” Indeed, the ICA exhibition features Mosaic Vessel, a six-and-a-half-foot totem from 2023 that symbolizes a church. “I think a lot of things are containers that can protect and preserve anything that’s important,” he explains. “The church contains people and their beliefs and religions, and what they are thinking and feeling.”

These monumental works require a bit more planning than his smaller, instinct-driven pieces. “I tend to draw something to outline, using pencils or watercolors,” he says, fanning a collection of sketches. I notice that some are a bold hue, a contrast to his minimalist metallic range. “Originally, I wasn’t thinking so deeply about the use of color,” Yasunaga muses. “But one day I realized that colors can give a very different character to each artwork. So, I often pick up a piece and think about what kind of color or character this piece is, and then I choose one for them.”