About fifteen years ago I was driving through Chicago with a friend in my rusted Pontiac Firefly when we felt compelled to exit Interstate 90 and stop at the city’s iconic Art Institute. Dusk light was darkening the endless corridors as we scrambled to take in all of the paintings we could before closing time, and we somehow got separated. With panicked thoughts of missing out on Chagall’s American Windows, I took a wrong turn into a small room and noticed the shimmer of a ghost-blue bowl. I was transfixed by the razor-thin rim cutting like a poem through the silence of the display case with evanescent precision—it was the first time ceramics had spoken to me. As my bemused friend came to lead me away, I penciled the name of the artist onto the edge of the gallery map: Fukami Sueharu.
Fukami’s blue originates in a green that first appeared in Northern Song era China (960-1170). The city of Jingdezhen in Jiangxi Provence, which is still known in China as the “Porcelain Capital,” was so named in 1004 because the ruler of the region at the time, Emperor Zhenzong, had become enamored with the nearly translucent white ceramic vessels being produced there. Shortly after this official recognition, the ceramists of Jingdezhen discovered that a smaller amount of iron introduced to the firing process for ceramic celadon vessels resulted in milky blue and green glazes called qingbai. Chinese buyers of the era were more attracted to the green-toned vessels produced this way for their similarity in appearance to jade, but an interest in capturing the lighter blue took hold in Japan where ceramicists eventually used the same process to transform the glazes of plain white hakuji ceramics into blue-tinted seihakuji. While its popularity has waxed and waned over the centuries, several contemporary Japanese ceramists, including Suzuki Osamu, Yagi Akira, Tsukamoto Kaiji, Kino Satoshi, and Fukami, have transformed seihakuji into serious works of modern art.
“I have always been inspired by the pale-blue seihakuji porcelain of the Jingdezhan kiln in China, and I have continued to create works in this style since the very beginning, even in my early twenties.”
Born in 1947 into a family of traditional potters in Kyoto’s Higashiyama Ward, Fukami Sueharu still resides in the city, and he has spent much of his life as one of the most innovative and respected ceramists in the world. Being steeped in the techniques of ceramics from an early age certainly helped Fukami on his path, but his embrace of seihakuji is what continues to make an impression on both the viewing public and the judges of prestigious international art prizes, like Italy’s 1985 Premio Faeza, and has cemented Fukami’s reputation both at home and abroad.
New York. London. Tokyo. While I will now travel a great distance for the rumor of a Fukami piece, it strikes me how often I’ve encountered his work in galleries and museums by chancing to catch a glimpse of that unmistakable blue. As these Fukami sightings became more frequent, however, I came to realize that all of his mature works are concerned with emotionally charged impressions in shapes that evoke soaring swords of breath, vanishing waves, or distant horizons. These are captured in a flawless glaze that bears no trace of the artist’s touch—about as far as one can get from the wabi-sabi ceramics Japanese potters are famed for.
How does Fukami achieve such detached expressiveness? As leading Fukami expert Shinya Maezaki has pointed out, while many of Fukami’s earlier, somewhat ideologically driven works experimented with a variety of colors and traditional casting techniques, since 1975 the artist has created ceramics exclusively in the visually “cold” medium of seihakuji celadon. But what truly differentiates him from most ceramists, who intentionally leave finger marks and other traces of process in their work, is Fukami’s use of slipcasting, a technique usually used by large-scale commercial manufacturers that completely eliminates imperfections by using molds rather than a potter’s wheel. Fukami utilizes this technique because it creates a seamlessness that is in keeping with his obsession with, to borrow the title of one of his exhibitions, “purity of form.” This removal of any sign of the artist through the unwavering perfection of his works’ surfaces is how Fukami is able to give form to the invisible in the overtly material medium of ceramics.
“The act of creation is a perilous and difficult journey, and for many years, I have suffered from the weight of creating. Not once did I think it was enjoyable… Just once, I hope to be able to enjoy the act of creation. Yet I am doubtful as to whether this is even possible.”
Simultaneously evocative of the elegance of traditional Japanese aesthetics and undeniably modern in form and execution, Fukami’s work offers the viewer a chance to approach and apprehend the flicker at the border of the seen and unseen. It is not an exaggeration to say that few other artists have better actualized the “dance” at the “still point of the turning world” found in the opening sequence of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:
And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards.
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
As Fukami himself has indicated, these are deeply spiritual works whose crystallizations on the material plane enact its eternal dance with the ungraspable one just beyond it. His is a devotional sensibility that his titles only gesture towards: The Gates, Midair, Scene Over the Horizon, A View of the Wind. At the same time, however, Fukami has recounted in various interviews that a physical experience that he had as a boy is at the core of his entire body of work:
“I had an encounter with a sharp breeze while on a cliff during winter…All the senses in my body felt the pleasure of the strange wind as it stabbed my cheek. This tactile experience is at the heart of my creations.“
As I write this in Kyoto while remembering a blue bowl in Chicago that flickers at the still point of its own vanishing, his work continues to remind me of the existential stakes of true art. Soar. Resolute Spirit. To the Other II. Coldly standing outside of both the artist and viewer while silently communicating an intimate yet universal depth of feeling, a Fukami piece is the tension between presence and absence, here and there, the memory of a wind and where the wind is blowing.
“In each and every work I create, the essence of why I create is imbued within and emanates from it. It is my emotions, my passions, my inspiration from Jingdezhen, that are all instilled in my work.”
-Fukami Sueharu
Nathan Mader is the author of the poetry collection The Endless Animal (2024), a finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award. His poems have appeared in Plenitude, The Fiddlehead, Kyoto Journal and elsewhere, including The Best Canadian Poetry (Biblioasis). From Saskatchewan, Canada he currently lives in Kyoto, Japan.
Note: A Lighthouse Called Katata, a gallery in the Shibuya district of Tokyo, showcases Fukami and other contemporary artists whose “works define space itself,” provided the photos that accompany this article. Great thanks to Aoyama Wahei, the gallery’s owner and curator, for giving me the opportunity to ask Fukami some questions and for translating his responses.
