Sake Cup with Turquoise and White Glaze

Also dated to around 1956 and held in the Honolulu Museum of Art (accession 6544.1), this glazed-stoneware sake cup pairs Kawai Kanjirō's late-period turquoise copper glaze with passages of opaque white, producing the deliberate chromatic juxtaposition that defines his most ambitious post-1950 work. The cup is wheel-thrown in a slightly squatter form than the companion cup 6543.1 in the same collection, and its surface is divided between a dominant ground of peacock turquoise and overlaid passages of milky white that read as both decorative element and as the visible mark of the potter's deliberate brush gesture rather than as a controlled industrial design. The two-glaze composition is characteristic of the technical fluency Kawai had developed across his career — from his early scientific glaze research at the Kyoto Municipal Ceramic Research Institute through the Joseon-inspired Mingei middle period to the saturated colour-field experiments of his last fifteen years — and announces the sculptural confidence and chromatic ambition of his final manner. The piece has been released to the public domain under a Creative Commons CC0 dedication via the Honolulu Museum of Art's Wikimedia Commons documentation programme.