| |
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
Nine years of undergraduate and post-graduate training, first at the Art Institute of Osaka City Museum and Nakanoshima School of Arts in Osaka, then at the prestigious Kyoto City University of Fine Arts has been followed by an illustrious thirty year international career as a ceramic artist.
Shoji's work covers a broad spectrum of ceramic expression. He is a fine exponent of tableware that he exhibits regularly. His pieces reflect the Japanese regard for the appearance of the dish being equal to the taste, and he makes platters and bowls for his friend, celebrated Sydney chef Tetsuya Wakuda's impossible to get bookings at, restaurant. Shoji's ceramics for food are featured in a recent book feting the renowned restaurant's first decade, and where Wakuda extols the virtues of ceramics in food service.
"There's a Japanese way of thinking that looks on a piece of ceramic without food as unfinished.
But put some food on it and the piece has a life, a reason to be."
In other work, the sculptural object was the means of expression in a series where the tools of daily life were rendered in free-standing ritualistic circle, or in bas-relief on large scale tiles, in a 365 mm grid, for floor or wall. Installations using unfired clay and glass or mirror shards have been other notable series, while his installation work, "Leaf/Seed Pod/Boat" with 365 black-fired water carrying forms in a swirling circle, was the Premier Award winner of the 1994 Fletcher Challenge Ceramics Award in Auckland.
Shoji also makes large-scale vessels, abstract and colourful and which give public voice to an inner questioning and doubt about the self and life's directions through inlaid coloured clay symbols.
His earliest training, that of painting, manifests in works where he employs the use of fire with a blow-torch and kiln burners to create a matt black surface upon board. These are then manipulated further with gold and silver leaf, burnt in, and colour added with crayon and paint. These "Ceramic Paintings", as he calls them, are, like his other work, based firmly within his own life and experiences.
While he acknowledges an Eastern temper to his work, through his training and heritage, he is too much the world citizen and traveller to reflect only Japanese concerns, and the legacy of his personal history reflects in the internationalism of his range and the complexity of his expression.
His work centres on human emotions and the intellectual processes needed to discover, disinter and make them tangible. It reflects the constraints and obligations necessary for adaptation to life and linear time. It is a journey undertaken to acquire understanding, of his heritage and his identity.
Mitsuo Shoji has been based in Australia since 1973, having teaching posts first in Melbourne, then Sydney, where he now is Senior Lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. He has taught at California State University, and been guest artist for residencies, and a participant in international symposia, in many countries over the past twenty-five years.
He has shown his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions, in Australasia, Japan, Europe and North America. He is a member of the International Academy of Ceramics, an organisation based in Switzerland and
affiliated with the United Nations. His work is held in public collections in Italy, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Finland, Switzerland, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
|
|
|
|
