Enduring Breaks: Kazunori Hamana and Yuyiko Kuroda’s Ceramic Sculptures

Artists Kazunori Hamana and Yuyiko Kuroda reform and repair the traditional Japanese tsubo.

Art Conversations

Words By

Megan Brownrigg

Photography By

Blum and Poe, Allegra Sussman and Marie Kobayashi

Hamana Kazunori and Yuyiko Kuroda share a belief about when something is broken. Their answer is almost always ‘not yet’. For these two artists, life cycles can and should transcend expectation and trauma. This conviction is demonstrated in their ceramic sculptures which have graced galleries such as Blum and Poe in LA and Tokyo. Kazunori’s ‘tsubo’ pots might have fallen down the stairs and kissed a few floors at speed, but their cracks live on viscerally in Kuroda’s veins of pewter kintsugi. This pair’s work is a testament that beauty can be born from fault lines.

“I found a lot of art could be too egoistic and wanted to tell too much,” says Kazunori Hamana of his first foray into sculptures. “But a tsubo is a container, it’s a vessel which contains something that you can’t see. Just like you and me have things on our minds: a tsubo has an inner and outer world: it holds invisible thoughts.”

Its barrel-body and coarse clay base renders a traditional Japanese ‘tsubo’ practical rather than immediately elegant. These pots have been used since prehistoric times to carry everything from water and tea leaves to long-stemmed flowers. But to Hamana, the jars are eloquently human.

The artist started making tsubos when he first moved to a quiet edge of the Japanese coast in 1998. At a community pottery class, Kazunori’s ceramic giants perturbed his classmates for being ten times the size of their tidy plates and vases. His tsubos break the rules of conventional art with their texture as well as their dimensions. Kazunori makes his own mineral resin, but his tsubos aren’t supposed to sit on shelves and stay shiny. Covered in fissures, these pots are shaped by the wind and rusted by the sun. They were born in, and designed to be returned to nature.

I speak to Hamana from his farmhouse in rural Isumi. It’s a place he’s renovated himself and where he fires his tsubos in a huge kiln. He still owns his ocean home nearby, which is where he begins manipulating his tsubos at the dining room table as he looks out to the water. When we speak, it’s the heart of the rice season and the artist has already been tending to his paddies. He’s checked the current crop’s water and soil, before cooking last year’s harvest of brown rice for his breakfast and lunch. Hamana’s synchrony with the outdoors isn’t accidental, but a significant part of his craft. A veteran farmer in my eyes, Hamana tells me about his first foray into the countryside as a child when he visited his aunt’s farm.

“I got there and I found cows,” the artist tells me with the same emphasis as if he’d found aliens in the garden.

“Eight of them maybe…”

Hamana admits to crying in a mix of fear and awe at these huge animals. The cattle made a lasting impression on him.

“Something changed in my mind that day. I thought: okay this is cool!”

It tickles me that Hamana’s childhood epiphany is reminiscent of an elderly man’s wisdom. Even so, Hamana’s early years were spent largely out of pace with nature. Instead, he grappled with the smog in his home city Osaka. Although people didn’t connect their kids’ raspy lungs with city pollution in the seventies, Hamana sensed that something was off in his surroundings, and switched his environment whenever he could. As a boy this meant visiting his aunt, as a teenager he attended agricultural college eight hours away, and in his early twenties, he crossed the Pacific to study in California.

“In cities, you have fun and distractions but life has more to offer than distraction,” the artist explains. “If you strongly connect with nature then you get more information.”

The artist has often joked that the US offered him hippy life by the ocean with the added bonus of surfboards and pretty girls in bikinis. But his real American treasure hunt took place in basements rather than beaches. He developed a collector’s appetite for denim and became a connoisseur of finding Levis jeans and Nike sneakers for three dollars apiece, which he’d bring back to his flea market in Japan. Hamana had picked his era perfectly; it was the early nineties and the trend took OFF. The only problem was, he was born to a family who expected him to become a doctor or lawyer, and this fashionista hustle came as a shock:

“They didn’t believe I could make money from dirty clothes with holes in them, and this was also 1992 and I was spending a lot of time in bars and nightclubs, so they thought I was a drug dealer!” he tells me with a half-laugh, half eye-roll of despair.

By the mid-nineties, Hamana had opened a store called ‘Blues’ in Tokyo. He found himself with a successful vintage clothing business which allowed him to drive Ferraris, travel the world, and party hard. He speaks of it as a wonderful, but chaotic time. Eventually, Hamana wanted to come back down to earth in Japan. His time in America had taught him how little he knew of his own culture, and he still jokes to this day how curious Westerners at university educated him about the greatness of Wasabi and Kurosawa films. But with the appeal of partying fading, and with a daughter to raise, Hamana felt drawn to be by the ocean in his home country. Ironically, this in itself was something distinctly ‘un-Japanese’.

“Japanese people have no culture of living in front of the ocean. They want to hide from the ocean because it’s too windy!” he laughs. The coastal house he eventually found only existed because an American serviceman had built it.

“He’d lived here in this secret spot, far away from Tokyo, because he was gay. He couldn’t go to the beach because of the macho military culture and judgement that came from that. This house became a community where gay men could freely spend time,” Kazunori explains. Although not gay or in hiding, Hamana found sanctuary in this house by the ocean. There, he felt restored to the rhythm of nature.

“In cities, you have fun and distractions but life has more to offer than distraction,” the artist explains. “If you strongly connect with nature then you get more information.”

For Hamana, this information was a calling to begin “outputting instead of inputting”. He realised that having been fortunate enough to see so much already, he’d taken enough in for a while. Now, he was ready to put art into the world. He started making his tsubos.

One problem with hand-crafting huge ceramic pots on the first floor of an ocean home, however, is getting them downstairs. One day, Hamana discovered this price through a thousand pieces. It was fellow artist and his now partner, Yuyiko Kuroda – who encouraged him not to melt down the broken clay and start again.

This is why, in certain tsubos of Hamana’s, we see cracks fused with gold. In others, lightning bolts of silver sew deep fractures of clay together. Having left her graphic design career to work with her hands, Kuroda trained in the art of kintsugi - a craft that connects pottery using urushi, a Japanese lacquer made from tree sap. Traditionally the urushi is mixed with powdered gold, but in some instances, Kuroda uses pewter instead. It keeps the repair inexpensive and simple. At its core, the art of kintsugi refuses waste, embodies repair, and embraces imperfection. Kuroda’s interest in the technique peaked after she lost a family member in her late twenties due to a clinical error.

“In the midst of my panic and grief, that hospital tried to cover up what had happened,” she tells me. “Since that day, things I used to take for granted have become difficult. Things like waking up in the morning, cooking, eating, laughing, going out, watching movies, listening to music, sleeping well…”. Following her loss, the artist felt as if something had broken irreparably within her.

Years after the event, Kuroda had friends around for dinner and a small plate, which meant a lot to her, was accidentally broken. After everyone had gone, she looked for the pieces and panicked when she couldn’t find them. She was stunned when she eventually found them in the trash can; a beloved trinket deemed worthless as soon as it was damaged.

“By training in an art of repair, Kuroda has distanced herself from an obsession with newness”

“I felt like this abandoned plate overlapped with myself, and I wanted to fix it,” Kuroda tells me. She looked for someone who could fuse it back together through kintsugi, but struggled to find a practitioner, so she trained in the craft herself. “I became fascinated with the philosophy of repairing and the nature of urushi. Little by little, kintsugi cured me mentally and physically. Today, I affirm wounds.”

Sometimes, instead of mending the breaks in Hamana’s ceramics with lacquer, Kuroda uses staples.

“While gold is used to ornament, a rivet is used for reinforcement. It’s an ancient technique that represents bold strength,” she explains. Hamana’s tsubos are robust and designed to survive rather than sit pretty, so her choice makes complete sense. Beyond the art of celebrating scars, Kuroda feels that kintsugi and riveting techniques also challenge the currents of consumerism. She feels they can remind us of the sustainable happiness we can feel if we opt to mend items rather than simply replace them.

“When you get pleasure from consuming, it leads you to more consumption to get that pleasure again. I experienced that the repeated consumption never filled me up,” Kuroda confesses. “It actually emptied me. So, I asked myself —how can I escape this situation? I often wonder why temples are isolated in the deep mountains, and I think it’s because even a monk who has undergone rigorous training can’t overcome his desires. The best thing to do is distance yourself from things you want to avoid.”

By training in the art of repair, Kuroda has distanced herself from an obsession with newness, and intactness, and dismissing anything that doesn’t bear these characteristics. Including herself.

“When it comes to recycling, I think it’s easier to understand with your body than with your brain. That’s the attitude you never give up– taking the lifespan of every single thing to its real end. It’s refreshing when you do it.”

Considering the years she spent struggling to embrace the simpler parts of life after losing her family member, I ask Kuroda what her creative routine looks like now. It includes all of these basic pleasures:

“I do light exercises, eat moderately, sleep well, maintain a regular rhythm of waking up and going to bed early, and playing with my cats. These sound sober, but they are the sources that motivate my creation.”

Understanding how important natural simplicity is to both Kuroda and Hamana, I ask about how their collaboration with each other works. It’s much the same.

“Since we have a good understanding of what is good and beautiful, we do not have to interfere with each other and can create freely.”

View more of Hamana and Kuroda’s work here and discover more inspiring stories like The Artist Making Ceramics Without a Kiln here on Urth Magazine.

Art Conversations

14 Aug 2023