No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone." So wrote T.S. Eliot in his classic essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Eliot claimed that rather than existing in conflict with tradition, an individual artist gains significance only through strenuous engagement with it. Not surprisingly, Eliot's views remain controversial, but his belief seems strikingly relevant to the extraordinary show of Japanese contemporary ceramics recently on exhibit at New York's Japan Society.
Titled "Contemporary Clay: Japanese Ceramics for the New Century," the show proposed a forward-looking if not prophetic consideration of where Japanese clay is going. Of the over 100 ceramic works displayed, nearly all were made since 1980 and more than half since 2000.