Hello everyone, how have you been?
I hope you all had a pleasant Silver Week, as the weather was mostly sunny across the country.
I am truly happy that so many customers from afar visited our shop.
Well, I recently visited the "Innovation: Momoyama Bizen" exhibition currently being held at the Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art.
Every single piece was of the highest quality—it was like an all-star dream exhibition.
Each and every item had such an intense presence that I thought I would probably need to visit several times,
and my intuition proved correct; it was an experience so shocking it left my mind a complete blank.
Amidst that, I remembered some advice from Mr. Takashi Soga,
so while I took in the whole collection to some extent, I also tried "focusing on individual pieces."
The first thing that left the deepest impression on me was the half-moon bowl at the back of the exhibition hall.
It had a design suggesting a circle with a portion missing, was liberally coated in "itogoma" (thread sesame) and "yogoma" (yellow sesame) glazes,
and featured a magnificent "botamochi" (peony cake) marking, a highlight of Bizen bowls.
However, what intrigued me most was the degree of its deformation (not mere distortion).
When you think of a half-moon bowl, you likely imagine something fairly flat like a tray.
In this piece, however, the center portion actually surged upward, deformed into a mountain-like shape.
There was a cylindrical adhesion mark left on the back, and I wondered if it had been fired while resting on something cylindrical,
causing it to deform under its own weight during the firing process.
But the area of the cylinder was very small compared to the area of the bowl,
leaving me with the question of whether it would really be fired in such an unstable state, like standing on one leg.
Or perhaps it was fired resting on the mouth of another work, like a turnip-shaped vase or a jar?
Still, even with such intense deformation, I felt this was not just distortion caused by coincidence,
but that the maker had deformed it intentionally.
Lacking in study, it is quite difficult to provide a perfect explanation, but
while I thought the rim of the bowl might be greatly distorted and splayed outward,
it actually maintained a solid vertical orientation relative to the base.
Much like Oribe tea bowls designed with ergonomics in mind to fit the shape of the palm, or the Bizen tea bowl "Tadaima,"
I get the feeling it was deformed intentionally with the user in mind.
Perhaps the gentle rise is what gives food arranged in it a three-dimensional effect?
I will make this question my homework and try to visit the Prefectural Museum again very soon.
(Please forgive me, as all of this is merely my own uneducated opinion.)