Gallery Labo is a creative platform for reinvigorating the spirit of Japanese pottery and for sharing that spirit with the world. The initiative comprises robust interchange among kindred spirits in the community of potters and pottery lovers.
Pottery is a supremely authoritative witness to history. The guiding principles at Gallery Labo are to embrace faithful accounts of history and to reject misrepresentations.
What Japanese cherish as their cultural heritage is a medley of traditions: some that have evolved uninterrupted over the centuries and some that once disappeared and were reconstituted in a later era. Pottery is a classic example of the latter.
The socioeconomic positioning of pottery has changed repeatedly through history in Japan, as in other nations. So too, have the forms of pottery and the means of its production. That change has occasionally reflected shifts in political leadership and has sometimes reflected developments in distribution.
Europe’s Industrial Revolution reached Japan in the latter half of the 19th century, and its arrival effected a definitive interruption in the continuum of traditional practice in such crafts as pottery making. Pottery occupied a place of prominence in Japanese life from the Heian period (794–1185) until the opening of the Edo period (1603–1868). It also occupied a prominent place as the Jomon works of prehistory, but the Jomon tradition of pottery making vanished around 300 BCE and did not bestow a direct influence on later eras.
Japanese pottery attained its aesthetic acme in the Azuchi-Momoyama period (1573–1603) and into the early years of the Edo period. Potters of subsequent eras have endeavored repeatedly to capture the essence of the best Azuchi-Momoyama works, but none have succeeded.
Assimilating and improving on technique and quality in any artistic tradition begin with studying the practices and principles employed in the extant works of our inheritance. But fulfilling our responsibility in regard to carrying on the tradition needs to include assimilating those practices and principles and then moving beyond them into new realms of creation.
The artistic landscape is awash with pottery rendered by ignoramuses who claim to be creating “contemporary work rooted in tradition” yet who have learned little of the tradition they cite. Gallery Labo provides aficionados with the opportunity to see for themselves how tradition figures in the work of conscientious artists.
