Material and Spiritual Entanglements with Ceramics

Looking at the case of contemporary Western practitioners in Japan

Abstract

Drawn by images of Japan centred on ideas of craftsmanship and spirituality, disseminated from the mid-nineteenth century, artists and intellectuals in the West have often searched East for something beyond the normative patterns of their societies. This paper looks at the case of Westerners who have crossed national borders to practice ceramics in Japan between the 1960s and the 2010s. Based on interviews with forty participants in Japan, I investigate their attraction to and entanglement with the ethos of Japanese pottery through an analysis of their narrative accounts. After tracing the contested relationships between Japanese ceramics and the country’s spiritual and philosophical traditions, I explore the practitioners’ accounts of their engagement with Japan-fostered ceramic making values and processes, particular in their bodily, material, and sensorial dimensions. Drawing on recent theories of making that incorporate Eastern philosophical frameworks and a view of aesthetics that goes beyond modern Western conventional understandings of art and beauty, I argue that Japan-nurtured ceramic making processes and spiritual philosophies function as a way for practitioners to articulate and explore multifaceted social connections with materials, objects, histories, people, communities, and environments, thus showing the many layers of relational engagement encapsulated in the experience of making. Finally, I claim that the makers’ attraction to the ethos of Japanese ceramics is rooted in cosmopolitan orientations, ecological aspirations, and the search for a good life. By giving Japan-fostered material cultural practices new meanings, Western practitioners' entanglements with Japanese ceramics illustrate the floating character of objects and their power in shaping identities beyond artificially defined borders, thus subverting Orientalist and cultural nationalist discourses.