Sokyo Gallery is pleased to present Special Selection: Exceptional Ceramic Works by Yoichi Umetsu, a solo exhibition of works by Yoichi Umetsu. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition at Sokyo Gallery, following Yoichi Umetsu: Heisei Mood in 2021.
Known for a wide-ranging practice that spans drawing, painting, moving image works, the operation of Parplume Gallery and Parplume School, and writing, Yoichi Umetsu began pursuing ceramics seriously in conjunction with his earlier exhibition at Sokyo. For Umetsu, ceramics was not simply a new medium in which to work. It provided a means of disentangling his practice from the art-historical and institutional contexts with which it had been associated. By engaging directly with the technical and industrial history of ceramics, he sought to reconsider the meaning of making works and the industrial dimension of contemporary art. As Umetsu himself explains, making ceramics has also restored the circuits of his imagination, reawakening impulses that had long lain dormant.
This exhibition traces Umetsu’s ceramic practice to date, from notable early works to the Pollen Strainer and Palm Treeseries, which occupy a central place in his ceramic oeuvre, to his latest work, Slab. The exhibition title, with its reference to “special selection” and “exceptional works,” implies that it designates a carefully chosen group of established masterpieces, but this is a humorously grandiose gesture on the part of Umetsu, who presents his own ceramics with utter confidence as exceptional despite having taken up the medium only six years ago. Who selected the works, and by what measure are they deemed exceptional? By deliberately adopting language with an air of authority, the exhibition employs Umetsu’s ceramics to inquire into what makes a work matter.
In late 2026, Umetsu’s work will be presented almost simultaneously at three very different venues: in the group show One Room, One Artist: Kenji Yanobe, Akiko Horio, Yoichi Umetsu, Kazuo Okazaki at Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, at the Nagano Prefectural Art Museum, and at Sokyo Gallery. After the present exhibition closes, his ceramics will also appear in Re-Shigaraki: Shigaraki New Wave – Expanding Horizons of Contemporary Creativity at the Foundation of Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, extending this series of presentations of his ceramics. With these concurrent museum and gallery exhibitions featuring his work from differing perspectives and on different scales, late 2026 will offer an unusually comprehensive view of Umetsu’s practice today.
Amid these developments, the following text by Umetsu offers his own account of the exhibition.
Special Selection: Exceptional Ceramic Works by Yoichi Umetsu
I was astonished recently when I looked through a PDF list of my works. The total came to well over 1,000, though some were works in media other than ceramics. For this exhibition, my first solo show at Sokyo in some time, I selected approximately 60 ceramic works from that list and added several new pieces.
Among my ceramic works, the three series Pollen Strainer, Bottlemail Ship, and Palm Tree have an especially iconic character. In each of them, rendering words and concepts visible takes precedence over formal considerations. The works begin with concepts central to my practice as an artist: pollen, messages set adrift in bottles, and palm trees resembling Hawaiian souvenirs, the last of which derives from my great-uncle Nobuo, who died during World War II in the Pacific. These are not simply motifs, and consequently, the relative success or failure of their forms has little bearing on the importance of the works.
In ceramics, one would ordinarily begin with the vessel as a fundamental form. However, I have never made a single vessel, or indeed anything with a practical function. I began working in ceramics just as 2019 was turning into 2020, and the first work I produced was Pollen Strainer. Its basis is what might be called a quasi-readymade: I packed clay into an off-the-shelf frying pan used as a mold, then inverted the resulting form, negating its function as a vessel. The asymmetrical part resembling a tennis racket was made with rattan weaving and filters in mind. Because the main body and filter differ greatly in thickness, and because I use two types of clay with different shrinkage rates and degrees of heat resistance, a high percentage of the works develop cracks.
Ceramics have long had a presence in contemporary art. Artists coming to the medium from contemporary art are often expected to deviate from the conventions and order of traditional ceramics, to exhibit forms of imagination and flexibility that depart from artisanal refinement, to embrace improvisation, or to emphasize the uncertainty of not knowing how a work will turn out until it is fired. Expectations of this kind have granted me a place in the ceramics world, but I have not always felt comfortable with that position. Naturally, I feel a frisson of apprehension each time I open the kiln, and I have experienced the gradual process of accepting cracks and deformations that might appear to be flaws. I did not, however, produce these works in resistance to traditional ceramics.
So, what is contemporary art? The term can refer to art produced since World War II, to conceptual art broadly defined, or, more recently, to critical engagement with politics, the environment, and issues affecting every kind of minority. When contemporary art intersects with crafts, though, it often takes on the context of either the art market or Mingei (Japanese folk crafts), the latter having ties to imperialism. From what I have observed, the market context greatly predominates. Contemporary art, now diversified and pluralistic, is awash in worthy themes, each advanced with the earnestness of a model student’s research presentation. In practice, however, these themes are used chiefly to bolster curatorial framings attuned to prevailing trends at international exhibitions and a select group of museum shows. Few viewers engage with the content of each work on its own terms. Crafts, including ceramics, are most conspicuous in contemporary art in the straightforward arena of buying and selling. Placing a vase with a contemporary sensibility at the center of an art fair booth, for example, is seen as a way of making the display look complete.
The ceramics world is also rife with all kinds of essentialism and spiritualism: invocations of powers beyond human agency, the anthropological recasting of people as “the human species,” drawing connections between one’s own work and the roots of civilization in the Jomon period (c. 10,000–300 BCE), communication with an inner cosmos. This text, however, accompanies a solo exhibition at a gallery and serves the more pragmatic purpose of promoting sales. One might say that it merely adopts a somewhat different promotional style, although if anything it may prove counterproductive.
So, why did I have to organize an exhibition of “exceptional works,” the title of which might seem a bit self-deprecating? First, an exhibition at Sokyo was arranged for August on short notice, leaving no time to establish a theme. I also had pressing personal reasons for wanting to sell my work at this particular moment. Last summer, I rented a unit in a Daiei (now AEON) shopping center in Ebina, Kanagawa Prefecture, and began operating a space called Parplume Gallery. I believed that running a gallery in a shopping center, a place regarded as far removed from art, would offer the most direct way to connect art with the wider public. To put it bluntly, though, I have struggled to cover the monthly rent and operating expenses. Parplume Gallery also operates on principles different from those of a conventional commercial gallery, which makes it still more difficult to sustain. Since the pandemic, I had not been particularly concerned with selling, but as I noted at the beginning of this text, coming face to face with a list of 1,000 works was a shock, and brought me out in a cold sweat.
Isao Nakauchi, the founder of Daiei, set out to defeat the department stores. He pioneered the new category of the general merchandise supermarket and delivered low prices through high-volume sales. All of that historical context is folded into the faintly nostalgic, department-store-style title of this exhibition.
Yoichi Umetsu
Contemporary artist, head of the Parplume collective