Lavender tinges the fog-gray surface of this chilling torn form by Hagi legend Kaneta Masanao enclosed in the original signed wooden box titled Hagi Haku-yu Yohen Kurinuki Mizusashi. It appears to be torn and wrestled, or perhaps chiseled from the earth, the p@ale glaze running over the ragged surface, settling into the clefts and folds. It is 20.5 x 23 x 20.5 cm (8 x 9 x 8 cm) and is in excellent condition.
Kaneta Masanao is certainly one of Hagi’s most well-known and easily identifiable names. Born the first son of Kaneta Sanzaemon, the 7th generation of a family of traditional Hagi potters in 1953, he graduated the Tokyo University of Education Sculptural Art department in 1977. For the following 3 years he exhibited sculptures with the Kokuga-ten Exhibition while attending advanced education at Tsukuba University before returning to work under his father in Hagi in 1979. Although an eighth-generation potter inheriting an overtly conservative tradition, he has transcended limitation, and was one of the first to begin carrying Hagi into the 21st century. His work evokes a distinct tension between both function and form, technique and tradition. He began exhibition with the National Ceramics Exhibition (Nihon Togeiten) and National Traditional Crafts Exhibition (Nihon Dento Kogei ten) in 1981, and has been much awarded at both venues. His first international exhibition was held in New York in 1995. He was awarded the Yamaguchi Prefectural Order of Cultural Merit in 2004, and succeeded as head of the family kiln the following year. His pieces are in the collection of the Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Ceramics in Gifu, Yamaguchi Prefectural Museum and Museum of Modern Art, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Museum of Art in Philadelphia among others.
