Vase

This glazed stoneware vase represents Kawai Kanjirō's sustained career-long engagement with the vase form as the principal architectural problem of studio pottery — the negotiation of a stable foot, a rising body, a defined shoulder, and an open neck whose proportions decisively determine the visual character of the assembled object. The form is wheel-thrown with a wide base and a softly tapered shoulder rising to an open neck, finished in a saturated stoneware glaze that pools more deeply in the interior of the form and thins to a translucent skin across the shoulder. Vases of this kind were the most substantial single category of Kawai's exhibition production: while bottles, plates, and lidded boxes anchored his Mingei domestic-ware output, vases gave him the architectural room to develop the formal experiments in proportion, glaze pooling, and surface incident that connected his early classical-glaze research to his late sculptural ambition. The piece is held in the Honolulu Museum of Art (accession 2271.1) and has been released to the public domain under a Creative Commons CC0 dedication via the museum's Wikimedia Commons documentation programme.