Shozo Michikawa: Sasama is on view at Erskine, Hall & Coe, London

Shozo Michikawa: Sasama is on view at Erskine, Hall & Coe, London

September 1-24, 2020

Erskine, Hall & Coe are pleased to present ‘Shozo Michikawa – Sasama’, an exhibition of 28 new ceramic works by Shozo Michikawa that celebrates the Japanese village of Sasama.

This is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with Erskine, Hall & Coe, and will include photography by Yoshinori Seguchi, a renowned photographer with whom Michikawa has collaborated for gallery and museum exhibitions over the past 20 years.

In 2011, Michikawa founded the bi-annual Sasama International Ceramics Festival, which has become a great success. The festival has revitalised a remote village in Japan, and last year received over 1,500 visitors, many of whom travelled from across the globe.

Many of the works in this exhibition were made at the festival during a three-day firing in an anagama kiln. Alongside the natural ash sculptural works, Michikawa created beautiful stoneware pieces in Kohiki, Benikohiki and Shino glazes.

The photography by Seguchi documents this festival and the local landscape of Sasama.

Shozo Michikawa was born in 1953 in Hokkaido, Japan. He initially had a career in business after graduating from Aoyama Gakuin University, but took up evening classes in art where he discovered a talent and passion for pottery. A few years later, Michikawa made the decision to give up his life in business and to focus on creating ceramics.

In 2005, Michikawa was given the great honour of being the first foreign ceramic artist to have an exhibition at the Taimiao in the Forbidden City of Beijing, China. More than 20,000 people attended this exhibition.

More recently, Michikawa was awarded a Gold Metal at the International Craft Fair in Munich in 2018, and in 2019 he was a finalist for the prestigious LOEWE Craft Prize, which was exhibited at the Sogetsu Kaikan inTokyo. Michikawa’s pieces are included in many important public collections, such as The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Musée Cernuschi in Paris, The China-Japan Exchange Center in Beijing and The Philadelphia Museum of Art.

His ceramics have been widely exhibited in Japan and around the world, including the USA, Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, the Philippines, China and Mongolia.

Yoshinori Seguchi was born in 1962 in Tokyo, Japan. He graduated from the Nippon Photography Institute in 1974 and went on to establish Studio Io, specialising in commercial photography. There have been several exhibitions of his photographs throughout Japan, and in 2016, his work was featured alongside Shozo Michikawa’s ceramics in Nature into Art at the Seto Ceramics and Glass Art Center in Aichi, Japan.

Contact
mail@ehc.art
+44 (0) 20 7491 1706

Erskine, Hall & Coe
15 Royal Arcade, 28 Old Bond Street
London, W1S 4SP

Images courtesy of Erskine, Hall & Coe. Photography by Andy Stagg.