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THIS CERAMIC ARTIST AIMS TO TAKE HIS SAKURA LOVE BEYOND JAPAN
Walking into ceramic artist Yuji Obata’s hotel room, one can sense the tender beauty of fragility and transience as the mind thinks only of cherry blossoms. Towards the right, lies a selection of the finest of his work, including a half-open incense container, cups and saucers inked in eclectic patterns and styles, and a large pentagonal plate. As my mind tries to shake off the sakura, Obata — as the representative of a 400-year-old legacy — appears.
“My favourite flower is the cherry blossom,” Obata, through his associate, Mina Omura, who has doubled as his interpreter, explains the frequent appearance of the motif in his work. “In the porcelain industry, the pink colour is a very expensive ingredient, and very difficult for the artists to use. That was why I decided to master using it, and chose sakura.”
As Omura adds that Obata paints other motifs, too, my gaze wanders off to the little incense container from earlier — it has wisteria painted on it. He has a thing for fish, too.
Obata was born in 1961 in the Japanese town of Arita, the cradle of Japanese porcelain manufacturing and the birthplace of its highlyregarded Arita ware, for four centuries now. His father had founded his own kiln, which Yuji would go on to take over, along with the former’s legacy, after he graduated from Tokyo, and completed professional training in Arita.
“I learned painting from my father. [But] the shaping techniques, I developed on my own... My style is to undertake all of the process myself, from shooting clay to moulding and firing it, and painting the final product,” he says.
As Japan hurtles towards a technological future, and, as the artist rues, continues to drop interest for handcrafted arts, why did Obata choose to pursue something that would take a long time to make? “I wanted to forge my own identity through it. I wanted to come up with something that no one could imitate.”
He exhibited his creations in New York in 2017, and intends to take the craft beyond Japan, “to India and other receptive markets.”
In Delhi, Obata has been to a few galleries. “I’ll visit India again later this year, and plan to teach my skill and passion to interested artisans here,” he says with a smile.