TETSUYA TANAKA 田中哲也 CV

Tetsuya Tanaka is a lecturer at the Nagoya University of the Arts and Kyoto University of Art and Design, where he graduated in Ceramic Art in 2002 after studying Oil Painting at the Musashino Junior College of Art (having first graduated in Business Administration and worked shortly as a salaryman up until the Japanese bubble economy burst in the early 1990s). He exhibits internationally and participates regularly in ceramics festivals, including in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Italy, Croatia, Hungary, Russia, USA, India and China. Recent awards received include the 2016 27th Shumei Cultural Foundation prize, Merit Prize at the 2016 Taiwan Ceramics Biennale, Honorable Mentions at the 2019 and 2015 Korean International Ceramic Biennale, and Honorable Mention at the 2013 Kobe Biennale. He has been guest artist-in-residence at the Clayarch Gimhae Museum International Ceramic Workshop (Korea), European Ceramic Workcentre (Netherlands), Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park (Japan), Yingge Ceramics Museum (Taiwan), and the Clay Studio (USA), among others. Tanaka's work is in the collection of institutions such as the Museum of Arts and Design (USA), Kerameikon Croatian Ceramic Association (Croatia) and Miho Museum (Japan). He is an active member of the International Academy of Ceramics.

Tanaka's work sits at the nexus of ceramic crafts and contemporary art. He seeks to chart new paths by creating a fusion of the two: developing new ceramic techniques and ideas from Japan's traditional crafts (kogei), and combining it with contemporary aesthetics and concepts that give the work a sense of the times. The potter proposes a reconsideration of the vessel and its functionality through his large, innovative sculptural pieces. Measuring up to five metres long and taking up to two years each to realise, these hefty, laboriously hand-constructed, unusual vessel forms are made to "contain" or reframe things that are invisible and without shape or form, such as sound, light, time and a view. The promise of "eternity" offered in the Toki (Time) sculptural works that Tanaka has developed most recently, made by casting ephemeral things such as dried leaves to translucent clay, is semi-permanent. As with the Kakeiki (also Kageki, Vessels for a View) works that form a hopeful but tenuous relationship with the landscape that is temporarily "captured" via the frame of the work and relayed to the viewer, Tanaka recognises the conundrum posited by his promise of "eternity" through his latest Toki series: while ceramics typically do not degrade and so offer a kind of semi-permanence so long as they remain intact, he does not forget to remind us that soil – and hence clay – is a finite, non-renewable resource.