about
Born in 1979 in Shizuoka, Japan, and a graduate of the Prefectural University of the Arts in Okinawa, Kazuhiro Katase trained with master potter Shigekazu Nagae, who elevated the slip casting technique from a means of mass-production to fine art.
In 2008, he moved to Toyota to set up his own studio, adjoining a gallery, "Zahen Shinpen / the things that surround us", in which he curates regularly and prospectively art & craft exhibitions. Kazuhiro Katase brilliantly embodies the new Japanese artistic wave and contributes to making Toyota a new cultural hub.
Kazuhiro Katase creates an extremely singular body of work in the Japanese archipelago, especially since he fully assumes the confrontation of two almost antinomic styles.
On the one hand, Kazuhiro Katase works with slip casted black clay to develop a corpus of muted and deep tones, inspired by art deco and Zen. The perfect combination of functionality, sobriety and simplicity that emerges from these pieces is nevertheless a technical tour de force, as much for the complexity of the shapes as for the great variety of glazes used.
On the other hand, he elaborates, from collected, mixed, and unrefined earthenware, a more expressive research work, based on hand-formed technique and a specific process of cracking. The firing and its hazards play a determining role in the finish of the object, marked by a unique texture and a crackled glaze. The palette offers a range of pastels, which, combined with the cracks, seem to be metaphors for the erosion of time. Ultimately, Kazuhiro Katase plays with the juxtaposition of materials and states - solid and liquid. Snow or milk flows gradually invade the vision and cover the object. This brings us to the heart of traditional Japanese imagery, as close as possible to the print, with the snowy Mount Fuji and the dying waves at the foot of the archipelago.
