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While visiting Shigaraki, a town well known for tanuki (a raccoon dog) pottery, I found something unexpected. One of the works of Taro Okamoto "Chair which refuses to be sit." I have often seen these chairs at The Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum in Aoyama, and the Taro Okamoto Museum of Art, Kawasaki. Whenever I met them, they made me laugh and tempted me to sit down for a while.
It is no wonder that Shigaraki let me reunite with this Taro-like avant-garde art entirely ironic and humorous!
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Once, Taro himself expressed a strong hope for the future of Shigaraki ware. He wrote as follows:
In the quiet and open space of Shigaraki town
The aroma of life from ancient times is still alive.
Potteries here reveal its humble feelings
And the robust appearance makes you feel the depth of history.
I was at the site of Shigaraki Palace
lying down in the sun
caught by my ambiguous feelings.
The times never wait us.
They are progressing steadily.
This old pottery town also has to shed its old way of production.
Where there is a tradition, the change is not easy.
So, not only the people in the town,
but also outsiders who love Shigaraki,
have to work together
to make the most of the charm of this town.
(Taro Okamoto, Shigaraki, an unexplored land of clay, 1968）
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The ceramic relief called “Black Sun,” put on the back of “The Tower of Sun”, the famous symbol of the 1970 Osaka Expo., is a massive work with a diameter of 8 meters. And the whole relief was made of countless black Shigaraki tiles. Before this work appeared, the “Chair which refuses to be sit” was first displayed at the exhibition at Takashimaya in 1964. Okamoto began to create these works using the technique of Shigaraki ware when he met Shichiro Okuda, the Omi Kagaku Pottery in Shigaraki. The fact that the extended traditional craftsmanship of Shigaraki ware fundamentally contributed to the modern avant-garde art, was probably a TARO-like episode because his art itself has lived far beyond time and space.
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