Masaomi Yasunaga Pushes the Limits of Ceramics, One Sculpture at a Time – W Magazine
22 December 2025
“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.
Read the full article by Jacoba Urist for W Magazine here.
Image: Masaomi Yasunaga, Melting boat, 2022, Glaze, colored glaze, colored slip, kaolin, clay, silver leaf, 80 x 175 x 68 cm, 31 1/2 x 68 7/8 x 26 3/4 in © Masaomi Yasunaga, Courtesy Lisson Gallery, Photography by Tom Barratt
