KUMAKURA Junkichi

Kumakura Junkichi (1920-1985) was a major figure in the world of Japanese sculptural ceramics. He graduated in 1942 from Kyoto Institute of Technology as a design major. From 1946 to 1947, Kumakura, along with Tamura Kōichi (1918-1987), was an assistant to Tomimoto at Shōsai tōen kiln, where he was greatly influenced by the master’s techniques and his concept of the role of ceramist-artist. Not long thereafter, he became a core member of the avant-garde Sōdeisha group of ceramists. He submitted his work to innumerable National and International Exhibitions including the Japan Art Festival, New York and the international Arts and Crafts Exhibition in Florence Italy. He was awarded the first Japan Ceramic Society Prize in 1954 and soon thereafter he was invited to submit works to innumerable national and international exhibitions including the Brussels World Exposition in 1958, where he took grand prize, and the International Ceramics Exhibition Prague in 1962, where he took silver prize. In 1989 a major retrospective exhibition, Kumakura Junkichi: Organs that Provoke, was held at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. He was also often exhibited and is in the permanent collection of the Japanese National Museum of Modern Art as well as the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. Along with Suzuki Osamu, Hikaru Yamada and Yagi Kazuo, Junkichi was one of the founding members of the influential Sodeisha (Crawling Through Mud Association), a group of revolutionary post war ceramic artists whose influence remains strong today. Throughout his career, Kumakura was attracted to and inspired by the improvisational character of jazz and its thenmarginalized position in the world of music. Equally unusual for the period, much of his work is boldly and explicitly focused on sexuality and eroticism.