Sake Cup (Turquoise Glaze)

Dated to around 1956, this small glazed-stoneware sake cup (ochoko or sakazuki, 盃) belongs to Kawai Kanjirō's brilliantly experimental late period, in which he developed an unprecedented vocabulary of saturated copper-turquoise glazes that broke decisively from the muted Mingei palette of the pre-war years. The cup is wheel-thrown in a compact tapered form whose rim turns very slightly outward to meet the lip, and is finished in a deep peacock-turquoise copper glaze of Kawai's own development — a glaze that owes nothing to Korean or Chinese precedent and that announces the sculptural and chromatic ambition of his post-1950 work. The interior is finished in the same turquoise, producing a single saturated colour-field that visually distinguishes Kawai's late cup work from the more conventional Mingei sake cups of his middle period. Cups of this kind were produced in small batches at his Gojōzaka kiln in Kyoto and were closely associated with his refusal in this period of both the Bunka Kunshō (Order of Cultural Merit) and the Ningen Kokuhō (Living National Treasure) designation: he saw the experimental freedom of his late work as incompatible with the institutional honours that would have framed him as an establishment artist. The piece is held in the Honolulu Museum of Art (accession 6543.1) and has been released to the public domain under a Creative Commons CC0 dedication.