Page 127 - Korean Buncheong Ceramics, Samsung Museum Collection (great book)

The full spectrum of stoneware production in the former Hizen Province during the Edo
period is far broader and more complex than the commonly known tea-related Karatsu ware of the
Momoyama period. Indeed, the development of Karatsu ware in the later period offers a fascinating
portrait of the expansion of a regional product into a sophisticated industry whose consumer base
would extend throughout the Japanese archipelago and into Southeast Asia and beyond. 31

uTsuTsugawa
In 1691, nearly one hundred years after the transfer of Korean potters to Kyushu following the Imjin
Wars, the Isahaya clan founded kilns devoted to the manufacture of a strikingly innovative stoneware.
These kilns in the town of Utsutsugawa, in western Hizen Province (today’s Nagasaki Prefecture),
would operate for nearly sixty years. The principal potter, Tanaka Keibuzaemon, had trained
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with the Kakiemon workshop in Arita, one of the two leading porcelain manufactories in Japan. The
influence of the porcelain-making technique and of the Kakiemon decorative vocabulary is evident
in this new Hizen ware. Indeed, Utsutsugawa ceramics are exceptionally thin-bodied, like porce-
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lain, and the clay itself, though rich in iron and therefore dark in color, is highly refined. Because of
its elegance and delicacy, Utsutsugawa ware is often referred to as the “Kyoto ceramic of Hizen,”
alluding to the sophisticated style of decorated stoneware made in the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries in the Kyoto workshops, which was also copied at the Karatsu kilns in Arita.
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The stylistic ties between the Utsutsugawa and Takeo Karatsu vessels are also evident in
examples with iron-painted designs and copper-green glaze. One quintessential piece of Utsu-
tsugawa ware is a dish with a foliate rim — the vessel was formed on the wheel then pressed over a
mold to shape the rim — and decorated with brushed white slip and a painted ginkgo-leaf design
(cat. 61). On both the interior and exterior of the dish (but especially on the latter and inside the
wide foot), the meticulously brushed white slip follows the turn of the potter’s wheel, revealing the
method of its application. Two large, near-symmetrical ginkgo leaves with overlapping and entwined
stems are superimposed onto the brushed white slip, covering the entire inside of the dish. The
leaves, superbly executed in iron-oxide pigment and copper-green glaze (all under a thin layer of clear
glaze), present a poetic and dramatic design that is almost abstract. Compared to the earthy,
visually textural, and exuberant decoration on Takeo Karatsu ware, which also combines iron-brown
painting and copper-green glaze (see cat. 60), Utsutsugawa examples like this dish are subtler,
smoother, and exquisite.
As with buncheong ware, the defining feature of Utsutsugawa ceramics is the ubiquitous and
creative use of white slip; Utsutsugawa’s lyrical refinement, however, is in many ways the antithesis
of buncheong’s bold dynamism. A prime example is a small, finely potted bowl, here, too, with a
decoration of ginkgo leaves (cat. 62a). The eye-catching white slip application — achieved by dabbing

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