TAKAYUKI SAKIYAMA 崎山隆之 CV

Takayuki Sakiyama is a stoneware specialist and the winner of the Grand Prize at the 8th Japan Ceramics Biennale in 2005. His works have been exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and are held in major public collections, including the Museum of Ceramic Art in Hyogo, Japan, Musée National de Céramique, Sèvres in Paris, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Art and Design in New York.

Sakiyama traveled throughout Japan after graduating from the Osaka University of Arts in 1981, looking for the perfect ocean view for sitting in his workshop before finally settling on the scenic shorelines and mountains of the Izu Peninsula. Fittingly, he looks to the sea for his inspiration. Over the years, Sakiyama has continued to work on refining his signature sand-glazed stoneware: intricately carved, curvaceous sculptural vessels, with a unity of form and line inspired by the flow and curves of ocean waves. Having studied under the avant-garde ceramicists Hayashi Yasuo, Yamada Hikaru, and Mutsuo Yanagihara, he developed a habit of focusing on form but ultimately sought to make works that were both functional and sculptural.

Sakiyama's most significant series Chōtō (or ‘Listening to the Waves’) is a continuation of his studies on the sublime and turbulent power of the ocean and the patterns and rhythms generated by its currents. In this work, a perpetual movement of lines curves into the inside and back out again in a closed Möbius loop, a swirling vortex and waveform molded in clay gesturing both at and beyond space and time, flowing into infinity.