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Kodai Ujiie: When Lacquer Becomes a Ceramic Surface
Updated: Oct 28
The red lines on Kodai Ujiie’s sake bottle do more than add a bright accent. They change how the eye reads the pale shapes beside them. A white area becomes an island; a narrow interval becomes a route. Looking at this handled work offers an entrance into a wider part of Ujiie’s practice: bringing lacquer and ceramic into the same visual language.
From an unexpected result to a new direction
Ippodo Gallery recounts an early turning point in Ujiie’s work. Before a student presentation, a celadon firing produced unplanned crazing. Drawing on earlier lacquer study, he introduced coloured lacquer to the piece. In the gallery’s account, an unwanted result became the beginning of an approach that continued to develop.
That story is useful because it changes the question we ask of a surface. A line can become a place for invention. Instead of seeing the divisions only as interruptions, we can notice how they organise colour, set up movement and give a vessel its character. The process history encourages attention to relationships rather than to an ideal of seamlessness.
Kintsugi as a point of departure
The gallery connects Ujiie’s work with kintsugi, the lacquer-mending tradition. Its 2023 studio interview describes coloured lacquer inlaid into ceramic surfaces. These accounts concern the artist’s broader practice; they help explain why repair-related ideas can become part of an object’s original artistic conception. They do not mean every visible line records a previously broken vessel.
The handled bottle makes that distinction rewarding to consider. Its red passages are central to the composition. They gather around the brightest pale areas, then become finer within warmer yellow-brown fields. Covering them in the photograph would remove much of the work’s movement. The boundary itself has become something to look at.
Why the surface can feel alive
In the same interview, Ujiie names skin, scales and cells among his sources of inspiration. His interest is in making forms that suggest living presences. On the bottle, the small polygonal areas invite a related kind of attention: we can follow a repeated structure while noticing that no two passages look quite the same.
This reading need not turn the vessel into a model of a particular organism. The pleasure lies in shifting between recognition and uncertainty. One moment the surface suggests a network of cells; the next it is simply a vivid arrangement of white, red and yellow-brown. The familiar bottle outline holds those possibilities together.
Return to the whole vessel
The short neck, flared lip and swelling body remain essential. They give the activity a beginning, a changing breadth and an ending. Looking only at a detail would miss how a red passage climbs along the body; looking only at the silhouette would miss the many smaller decisions within it. Lacquer and ceramic become most engaging here through that exchange between surface and form.
Look again: compare a strongly red-lined passage with a quieter yellow area. How do the different boundaries change your pace of looking?
The finished handled work is shown for reference. The discussion of Ujiie’s wider practice does not assign this bottle a production year or a detailed firing or lacquer recipe.
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