Description: A porcelain jar by Ujiie Kodai (氏家昂大), one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Japanese ceramics, working in a technique he invented. The technique — urushi-kannyū-sai Kannyū is crazing: the fine network of cracks that opens across a glaze as it cools at a different rate from the body beneath it. For a thousand years potters have treated it as either a flaw to be eliminated or a texture to be admired. Ujiie treats it as a drawing surface. Into those cracks he works coloured urushi — Japanese lacquer — so that the fracture lines themselves carry pigment. Here they run in two registers: a deep cobalt that pools and bleeds through the body of the piece, and a fine vermilion that traces the surface in a web so thin it reads as something beneath the glaze rather than in it. The effect is unmistakably vascular. The lines branch and taper and rejoin the way capillaries do under translucent skin, and the white porcelain around them takes on the quality of something living rather than something fired. This is deliberate. It is the whole point of the work. The tradition it stands on Ofuke was the private kiln of the Owari Tokugawa, established inside Nagoya Castle's Ofukemaru compound in the early seventeenth century. Its glaze — feldspar and wood ash over a white body — fires to a pale green in oxidation and a pale, celadon-like blue in reduction, and the blue was the one the lords prized. It was a courtly, refined, tightly controlled ware. Ujiie takes that glaze and lets it do the opposite of what it was made to do. The form is asymmetric, the shoulder swells unevenly, the mouth is irregular, and the surface has been allowed to run, pool and fracture. It is Ofuke pushed until it becomes a body rather than a vessel. The artist Ujiie was born with microtia — a congenital condition affecting roughly one in ten to twenty thousand people, which left him with an incomplete left ear and hearing loss on that side. His childhood included some ten reconstructive operations, and the ear that resulted was built from part of his own rib. He has spoken openly about what that produced: a lasting sense of carrying something foreign within his own body, and the difficulty of accepting a part of himself he had not chosen. His work grew directly out of that — not as illustration, but as a way of arriving at a position. What he arrived at is that no life is complete, that imperfection is not the exception but the ordinary condition of being alive, and that this is grounds for affirmation rather than despair. That idea is what these surfaces are. The fractures are not damage. They are what the object is made of. He has exhibited internationally, including a solo exhibition in New York, and is represented in Japan by B-OWND. The box The inside of the lid is marked not with a seal but with the artist's own thumbprint in red, pressed by hand. For a maker whose subject is the body and its irregularities, it is the only signature that would make sense — and it makes this jar traceable to him in the most literal way an object can be. Shipping from Japan with Tracking Number & Insurance. I promise fast shipping via FedEx or DHL as soon as possible! Import duties, taxes and charges are not included in the item price or shipping charges. These charges are the buyer’s responsibility. These charges are normally collected by the delivering freight (shipping) company or when you pick the item up - do not confuse them for additional shipping charges.