Masahiro MORI Ceramics Exhibit
Masahiro MORI Ceramic Design Exhibition: Exhibit Review
Experience hands-on beauty of contemporary porcelain tableware by trail-blazing Japanese industrial designer
To be successful, functional ceramics need to appeal to both function and our senses. Not only must a piece perform well as a tool, it must also have a pleasing shape and colour, and feel balanced in our hands. The truly superior pieces inspire an ‘aha’ moment that communicates a raft of possibilities and a flash of insight into the minds of its designers and creators.
The Masahiro Mori Ceramic Design Exhibition offers several opportunities for these revelatory moments. Departing from standard exhibition practice, the Japan Foundation encourages visitors to interact with the pieces in this modest exhibition: to touch them, to hold them, to select their favourites, even to use them for tea and coffee.
Picking up the bottles, bowls and mugs and using them allow visitors to experience the beauty of these functional pieces through multiple senses. This is vastly more enjoyable and informative than merely gazing at objects trapped behind glass cases.
Featuring simple pieces with elegant modernist lines, the exhibition illustrates how Mori’s functional ceramics revolutionized the world of post-war Japanese industrial design. By fusing traditional ideas with a modern sensibility, Mori effectively appealed to an increasingly affluent and Western-influenced Japanese society and created pieces that accommodated changing needs, ideas, living standards and tastes.
He also pioneered the then-nascent concept of creating one-off designs in high volume runs – essentially mass manufacturing products with deliberate irregularities that mimic the handmade and diversifying the decorative elements on a given design. This sought to re-introduce a level of diversity and individuality into factory-produced ware.
The star of the exhibit is undoubtedly the G-type Soy Sauce Bottle designed by Mori in 1957 for the Hakusan Porcelain Company (Hakusan Toki Company Limited) in Hasami, Nagasaki. A delicate little jar-like lidded bottle (about the size of a tiny can of tomato paste) with an “elephant trunk” no-drip spout, it is surprisingly light to the touch and impressively balanced. This shoyusashi won the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry’s inaugural Good Design prize (commonly known as the G-mark) in 1960 and has toured museums even as it continues to grace modest tabletops. Currently still in production, it has inspired generations of crude look-alikes, although none handle as well as the real thing.
The other highlight is the looped video showing how the pieces are slip-cast, trimmed, glazed and fired by the 80-person Hakusan factory. Anyone who has ever been curious about the goings-on in a small ceramic factory will be fascinated, especially by the fact that the bulk of the work continues to be painstakingly done by hand.
Trained workers manually pour slip into moulds, or place clay onto slump moulds to be jiggered, trim the pieces, glaze them, clean them, and load them into saggers for firing. The process is identical to that of a studio potter except that these people have been assigned specialized tasks and are creating in volume.
Also notable is the series of Shallow Rice Bowls displayed on a low platform on the ground. Although each is identical in shape, size and balance, they are decorated in one of 300 available styles ranging from one single hand-drawn line to elaborate glossy/matt floral patterns.
I was quite taken by the “WA” series created for MUJI, a coalition of small, specialized factories. Designed for chopstick dining, these softly rounded dishes and bowls are either left plain white or feature discreet white-on-white slip trailed designs. The series also includes ingenious chopstick and spoon rests in the form of rings divided into two parts. The spoon rest consists of the larger ¾ of the ring, and the chopstick rest consists of the smaller ¼ part of the ring.
Finally, there are slip moulds on loan from Hakusan. Precise and fragile, they lend insight into the various clay components that are needed to create a G-type soy sauce bottle.
To be sure, there is a certain impersonality about these mass-manufactured pieces. They feel like a good concierge: friendly, neat, clean and efficient, but meticulous in maintaining a discreet, professional distance. Through careful observation, one can even discern the unique sensibility that persists in current Japanese design in robotics and appliances.
However, the warmth of the Japan Foundation staff more than makes up for this. Their invitations to roam the exhibition and to pick things up get visitors emotionally responding to the pieces to the point where some are actually ranking the bowls and manually picking out their favourites. This is how pieces made to be used in everyday life should be experienced.
The only thing you are not allowed to do, it seems, is to keep the pieces and take them home with you. But I urge you to play with them at the Japan Foundation until May 5, 2007 in Toronto, Canada. Admission is free.
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