Flower pot with iron inlay

Yagi Kazuo was one of the great innovators of Japanese ceramics. Together with other artists who belonged to an avant-garde group called So_deisha, he successfully pushed the expressive boundaries of clay. For this dramatic vase, he applied a white slip over a underlying dark clay body. By carving through the white clay, he revealed the dark clay beneath. While this technique had long been used by potters in China, Japan and Korea, Yagi's assertively contemporary, non-representational surface patterns were surprisingly innovative at the time--and still seem fresh even today, over fifty years later.