氏家 昂大
Kodai Ujiie - The Movement of Genius
On the Metamorphic Ceramics of Kodai Ujiie
There are artists who master tradition, and there are artists who break it open to birth something new. Kodai Ujiie belongs to the latter.
His work resists the stillness of classification. It heaves, expands, ferments; it ruptures and regenerates like a living organism undergoing perpetual transformation. In The Movement of Genius, his second solo exhibition at The Stratford Gallery, we are witness to a new stage in this evolution — one where the vessel is no longer merely a form but a force, a site of energetic change, and a proposition for a new species of ceramic life.
To encounter Ujiie’s most recent works is to stand before something simultaneously ancient and unprecedented. His large hybrid tsubos — monumental forms from which other vessels seem to bud, split, or be born — are not simply objects, but events. They enact rather than describe. They appear to grow of their own volition, their surfaces bubbling with textured glazes, their bodies marked by fissures, scars, extrusions. They have not been made so much as manifested, as if drawn from an earth deeper than the one we know.
Gesture and Genesis
At the heart of Ujiie’s practice is a profound respect for clay as a volatile, expressive, even wilful material. He works with it not as a servant to form, but as a collaborator in metamorphosis. Finger impressions remain visible. Spirals emerge not as decoration but as traces of a body in motion. In these recent works, the artist’s gestures feel increasingly elemental: pressing, tearing, distending, folding — as though he were not shaping clay but conducting a choreography of pressure, breath, and rupture. This is ceramics as gestation, not construction.
Nowhere is this more powerfully felt than in his large-scale works, which serve as cores of energy. Smaller vessels seem to be grown from or expelled by these parent-forms, like parasitic satellites or embryonic echoes. It is a grammar of birthing, a syntax of split selves and interdependence. One cannot help but think of cellular division, of fungal mycelium, of coral reefs or alien carapaces. These are not static pots. They are bodies in the act of becoming.
Tradition and Fracture
Although his visual language is strikingly contemporary, Ujiie’s sensibility remains informed by the weight of Japanese ceramic history — not through lineage (he is first-generation), but through deep and intentional engagement. His decision to work with traditional vessel forms — most notably the tsubo, but also chawan, shuki, and hanaire — places him in intimate dialogue with the past. Yet he does not handle these forms with detached reverence. He reimagines them through acts of transformation, as if coaxing each archetype into a new state of being.
Where the tsubo might traditionally express a sense of containment and monumental stillness, Ujiie’s versions are reverent mutations. They honour the spirit of the form while rupturing its boundaries. His large tsubos become generative bodies — not sealed containers but living cores from which other forms appear to sprout, divide, or be expelled. In the same way, his chawan seem less like vessels for ritual and more like artefacts from a future ceremony — eroded, blistered, blooming at the lip. Shuki are remade with eruptive textures and seismic shifts in scale, while hanaire stretch upward or collapse inward with unexpected gravitational gestures.
This is not rebellion for its own sake. It is transformation in the spirit of continuity — a way of recognising the past while expanding its expressive terrain. The results are often startling, but never ironic. They feel inevitable, like a seed fulfilling its deeper potential.
His approach aligns, in energy if not aesthetic, with the legacies of Gutai and Mono-ha — movements that dissolved the boundary between artist and material, subject and world. Like Kazuo Shiraga painting in motion or Nobuo Sekine repositioning earth as sculpture, Ujiie allows clay to exceed the limits of intention. His process is physical, intimate, even violent — but always generative. His fractures are never destructive. They are sites of emergence.
Material as Metaphor
The surfaces of these works are not decorative. They are consequences — of movement, of instability, of chemical reaction and material memory. Ujiie’s glaze and clay interactions defy logic. They ooze, crawl, calcify, erupt. Some look as though they were poured molten and cooled in motion; others seem fossilised or scorched, bearing the evidence of transformative heat.
He speaks often of fermentation in his making process — a slow and sometimes unpredictable transformation where matter itself becomes altered by unseen activity. This notion of “fermenting” glaze and clay captures something essential about his work: the sense that each piece is not an object but an ecology. A ferment is not controlled — it is provoked and then watched, waited on, respected.
His latest surfaces behave like living membranes: stretched, collapsing, breaking under pressure. They remind us that clay is never inert. It is an earth that remembers touch, time, and temperature. In Ujiie’s hands, it also remembers the future.
The Vessel Reimagined
In this show, the vessel becomes something mythic. Ujiie is not merely reworking archetypes — he is mutating them. The forms no longer signify containment, but generation. Smaller forms emerge from larger ones; appendages grow or tear away; ridges spiral like ridgelines on bone or bark. These are not pots in variation — they are pots in mutation. And what we witness, ultimately, is the creation of form as species. Ujiie’s vessels do not resemble traditional types — they resemble life. They feel like new entities, part-object, part-organism, neither familiar nor wholly alien. It is here that the work brushes against speculative territory: ceramic as a biological event, as a system that evolves.
This speculative dimension resonates deeply with Japanese philosophies of animism and impermanence, where objects are imbued with spirit, and where change is the only constant. But it also gestures forward — toward a post-functional, post-traditional understanding of the vessel as a site of becoming.
The Genius in Motion
Genius, in this context, must not be understood as a finished state. Ujiie does not present mastery; he refuses it. Instead, he commits to movement — the act of pushing beyond what has already been learned, already achieved. He is among a small number of ceramic artists working today whose practice feels entirely non-derivative: not bound by imitation, not beholden to established modes, but guided by the demands of the work itself.
This refusal to rest is what marks genius in motion. It is not about spectacle. It is about seriousness of intent. It is about listening to materials, engaging risk, and allowing oneself to follow the work to its logical — or illogical — ends.
We at The Stratford Gallery have represented Kodai Ujiie for over seven years. We recognised something distinctive in his work long before many in his home country had yet turned their attention his way. Our visits to his studio in Japan have affirmed again and again that his development is not linear — it is volcanic. He works in eruptions. Each new body of work does not refine the last; it displaces it, absorbs it, transforms it.
In this show, we believe we are seeing a milestone. Not an apex, but an inflection — a point where the work moves with greater ambition, greater mass, and greater force than ever before.
Toward the Unknown
To stand before these works is to feel not just admiration, but alertness. They demand presence. They disrupt assumptions. They make no concessions to polish or preciousness, and yet they are profoundly, irreducibly beautiful.
They are beautiful because they are alive.
The Movement of Genius invites viewers to release their expectations of what ceramics can or should be. It offers, instead, a series of propositions: What if a vessel could birth its own offspring? What if clay could reveal the conditions of its own making? What if genius was not something a person held, but something that moved through them — like energy through matter, like breath through form?
We offer this collection not as a conclusion, but as a threshold. Ujiie is in a constant state of arrival, a restless traveller who knows the destination is the journey with all its uncharted wonders. It is in these travels that we witness his movement of genius.
Howard Clegg Director
The
Stratford
August 2025
Gallery
