Kai Tsujimura
Kai Tsujimura is the second son of one of the most gifted potters active in Japan today, Tsujimura Shirô. Despite his youth, Kai has inherited from his father a great facility with the wheel and a magician’s touch in his ash-glazing resulting from his command of the process of wood-burning firings. Influenced by Momoyama era aesthetics, he creates powerful functional vessels that are both dramatic and sensual. Unlike most of his contemporaries, who closely control the firing process, Kai delights in the unexpected and incorporates chance into his creative process. His oeuvre includes in addition to ash-glazed vessels, ceramics with translucent glaze (egarasu) as well as white slip glaze (kohiki).
Shiro Tsujimura
The contemporary Japanese potter Tsujimura Shiro was born in Gosei, Nara Prefecture in 1947. He is a tea master and self-taught painter that began his independent study of ceramics in 1965, after being inspired by a classic ido tea bowl in Japan Folk-Craft Museum. Prior to that moment, his main passion had been oil painting. He began fully committing to pottery in 1968, after a two-year stay at Sanshoji, a zen temple in Nara. In 1970, he was able to build his own house in Mima, Nara City. During the next seven years there, he built a workshop, a teahouse, seven kilns, and held his first show at his studio in 1977. In 1993 he built a kiln in West Devon in the U.K. He is highly influenced by Momoyama era aesthetics, creating compelling, functional vessels. Several solo exhibitions followed his first 1977 show. He has exhibited widely in The US, Japan, and Europe, and has been featured in various publications. The work of Tsujimura Shiro in a number of museum collections including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, as well as the Stockholm Museum of Art in Sweden. His sons, Tsujimura Kai and Tsujimura Yui, also took on the art of ceramics.
Mike Weber
Mike Weber was born in 1941 in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. He received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and taught ceramics at the university level for 20 years, retiring in 2004. Weber has been wood-firing for over forty years at his studio in the forest of northern Wisconsin. He has exhibited his work throughout the United States, in Europe and Japan. Of his work, Weber states: “My work is wood-fired in an anagama kiln for several days. This type of firing achieves the