YUKI Hayama’s The Garden of Dreams: Porcelain Stories will mark his second solo exhibition at Ippodo Gallery. Working in Arita, Saga Prefecture, the birthplace of Japanese porcelain, Hayama produces intricately patterned pieces that are said to blur the distinction between painting and ceramics.
Masterfully thrown on the wheel and painted with extraordinarily detailed imagery, his works both celebrate and explore the capabilities of the ceramic medium.
Yuki Hayama, Goddess of the Moon
Yuki Hayama, Perfume Bottle: Ten Thousand Flowers (Small, Medium and Large pictured)
Hayama builds his colour palette from just five traditional, hand-ground glazes made from natural materials. Delicate layering of these produces the 72 colours with which Hayama works, each combination of which is fired up to 12 times to produce his jewel-toned works.
His imagery is rooted in traditional Japanese ceramic practice. Goddess of the Moon (pictured above), for instance, is populated by the 12 zodiacs, beautifully and symmetrically placed around the piece’s edge.
Yuki Hayama, Perfume Bottle: Rokumei (Deer’s Cry)
Yuki Hayama, Memorial Box: Melody of Tranquility I
Yuki Hayama, Perfume Bottle: Green Phoenix and Arabesque with Gold glaze
Ancient myths colour the figures that feature on his works, and each pattern is consolidated by his life-long study of the world’s historical decorative pattern work. Of his works, Hayama says, “Even when broken, fragments of ceramics remain, never to be totally destroyed but serving as a bridge between the past and the people of the future.”
by Connie de Pelet
Garden of Dreams is at Ippodo Gallery in New York until May 28, 2021