Masayuki Miyajima
Birth Date: 1953

Artist Gallery
Japanese potter Masayuki Miyajima has drawn inspiration from historical ceramics—above all Korean Joseon-period buncheong slipware and Song dynasty longquan ware—while modifying their characteristic traits through the subtle innovation that comes with interpretation rather than imitation. While Miyajima pottery summons properties of famous precedents, it has its own individuality. Miyajima’s had the unique ability to train as an apprentice system, still thriving in Mashiko and at other historic pottery centers in Japan. He also has a career as a production potter to which he has dedicated himself for the past three plus decades. His work reflects reflect the Mingei principles passed down to him from the generation of Soetsu Yanagi and Shoji Hamada through his teacher, the Mashiko master potter Tatsuzo Shimaoka, a “National Living Treasure” of Japan. Although at Hosei University Miyajima majored in economics rather than art, he was captivated both by the pottery of Mashiko and by the lifestyle of those who carried on its ceramic traditions. Despite his lack of experience handling clay, he impressed Shimaoka as a serious young man, dedicated to his work in photography. Consequently, in 1980 Shimaoka invited Miyajima to serve as his fourth apprentice, over the next five years teaching him the skills requisite to a career as a production potter but also introducing him to the beliefs about functional pottery that have served as his guiding principles ever since. Miyajima began producing the wide array of functional forms. At that time working exclusively in gas-fired stoneware, he created tableware with relatively simple surfaces, sometimes adding texture through tobigana (chattering) or hakeme, (applying slip to a wheel-turned pot to create streaky brush strokes). While he occasionally returns to these methods today, his signature work since the mid-1990s has relied on a slip-inlay technique inspired by sanggam pottery of the period, a variety of the Korean slipwares revered by Yanagi, Hamada, and Shimaoka. The influence of Korean pottery remains strong in his work. Miyajima continues to combine materials specific to one genre with another to find new uses for traditional materials and glazes. Miyajima is married to Darice Veri, a potter who lives in Upper Arlington, near Columbus, Ohio, and so he travels between the United States and Japan.