Jun Nishida

He is best known for his massive conceptual pottery pieces, which experiment with the material capacities of clay and the imaginative forms that ceramics could take amid the intense thermochemical conditions of the kiln.

Throughout his brief yet productive career, Nishida pushed the boundaries of contemporary ceramics, challenging conventions of scale, abstraction, and method to produce a radically new visual language of pottery.

In his monumental series, Zetsu (絶) (2000-2005), Nishida melded porcelain pieces and powdered glaze into enormous agglomerations that would morph, crack, and distort in unpredictable fashion, which he proceeded to carve and chisel after removing from the kiln to produce evocative sculptural forms.

[3] He began by creating large mold-cast porcelain pieces, often shaped in semicircular and tubular forms, which were then mixed with glaze and poured into spherical or cuboid containers.

The artist then proceeded to vigorously smash, chisel, and hammer the matrix to reveal extruded forms and partially baked and molten portions of clay and glaze.

[1]: 87 Nishida's practice grew out of a postwar avant-garde trend of Japanese ceramicists seeking to separate associations of functionality from ceramic arts and emphasize their works as primarily sculptural objets.

[citation needed] Nishida understood his creations as the results of organic processes, describing his ceramic works as "essentially copies of natural forms" and likening his practice to "how Mother Earth makes stones.

These synthetic adhesives yellowed, crystallized, and become opaque over time, thus requiring intensive conservation work to not only maintain the structural form of the objects, but their surface quality and white appearances as well.

2 (Museum of Contemporary Ceramic Art, Gifu) features a semicircular porcelain form enveloped by the powdered glaze, partially concealed within an ovoid structure.