Shiro Otani   1      2      3      -      PRINTER VERSION

>> places in Japan also have a long history of wood-fired ware, Shigaraki's clay and the unique way it interacts with fire have made it recognizable worldwide.

Up until the mid 1970s, Otani expended all his energy and resources learning how to make and fire work that fit his image of traditional Shigaraki ware. Then, he experienced a kind of crisis in faith and began to fear that it was impossible as a modern artist to make any impact on the Shigaraki tradition. It seemed to him that there might not be any room for his personal aesthetic investigations. Otani struggled through the early '80s to find his own voice, at times even exploring possibilities outside the Shigaraki tradition. In 1980, for example, he applied for and received an exchange fellowship from the Japanese Ministry of Culture and the National Endowment for the Arts. He spent a year at the University of Tennessee, and a brief period at Arrowmont School for Arts and Crafts, where he built and fired a Japanese-style, wood burning anagama.

Although his stay in the U.S. was personally gratifying—allowing him to meet, exchange ideas and form friendships with many American craftspeople—it only created more confusion in his mind about exactly what kind of work he wanted to make. The freedom to experiment exhausted him. He started down numerous paths of inquiry only to reach as many dead ends. It was a time when he changed his mind a lot, a time when he was often unsure of himself, and his work by his own admission reflected this state of uncertainty. This period shows, though, perhaps more than anything else the strength of Otani's desire to find his own voice by taking the kinds of risks that most Japanese potters would find unacceptable. This desire not only led him to live and work in an alien culture where his cultural preconceptions were severely challenged, but also forced him to focus on that part of his work where the superficial idiosyncrasies of culture cease to be relevant. Otani's approach, both then and now, reminds me of something Walt Whitman said in Leaves of Grass: "I reject none, accept all, then reproduce in my own form."

In 1985, Shiro Otani returned to Arrowmont for three months to make work for a Tokyo exhibition. In the catalog for that show, he wrote: "Since Shigaraki ware is unglazed and carries no external design, its quality can only be expressed in such abstract words as 'taste' or 'sense of understated elegance'. Within these parameters, I asked myself what it was that I could add to Shigaraki. Looking out over the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, I rethought these problems as if standing outside myself."

There was no sudden moment of enlightenment where he clearly saw the direction his work should take. Instead, certain elements and concepts slowly seemed to reassert themselves in his mind and began to take on renewed significance. One of the most important of these was the concept of harmony. A vase, for example, must not only accommodate the flowers it was made to contain, but also fashion a moment in space where those flowers together with the vase create an aesthetic or spiritual resonance that either of them alone would have been unable to achieve. This idea of harmony, which eschews the supercilious and egotistical in favor of the subtle and unassuming, forms the cornerstone of Otani's idea of beauty. This kind of harmony, however, should not be confused with the easily appreciated, predigested sort of beauty that lacks psychological texture and emotional tension. Instead, it is
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