Ryoji Koie

Among the many Japanese ceramic artists working today, Ryoji Koie is the one at the most critical interface with contemporary art. Whether teabowl, vase, open-mouthed cylinder, tray, or bottle, Koie's chosen shapes are instantly identifiable as pottery yet they become departure-points for an extraordinary range of surface treatments from the indulgent to the austere.This volume illustrates and considers a body of work created by Koie during a residency in Seattle at the University of Washington. He located natural deposits of clay in a variety of local sites. Vases, vessels, trays, footed plates, and "stretched" plates were created in profusion, each subject to the artist's free-wheeling imagination in altering, throwing, ripping and tearing, and applying glaze and liquid clay or "slip".Kangas, Matthew is the author of 'Ryoji Koie', published 2000 under ISBN 9780295979717 and ISBN 0295979712.