TSUJIMURA Shirō辻村史郎

Dates: b. 1947
Country: Japan

Tsujimura Shiro was born in Nara Prefecture and initially trained as a painter before turning to clay in the late 1960s. Largely self-taught, he established his residence and wood-fired kilns in the mountains of Mima, Nara, where he has worked continuously since 1970. Working with clay gathered from his immediate environment, Tsujimura builds and fires his works using traditional anagama and noborigama ‘climbing kilns’, allowing natural ash, flame and extreme temperatures to act directly upon the surface. Cracking, distortion and variation are not treated as defects but as essential structural elements, positioning firing as a formative sculptural process rather than a final stage.

Central to his practice is the tsubo (jar), a form he has transformed from a functional vessel into a work of pronounced sculptural presence. Constructed from iron-rich clay and fired at exceptionally high temperatures, his tsubo record the direct action of gravity, ash fall and flame, balancing mass and fragility while pushing the form to the threshold of structural instability. While informed by historical traditions such as Iga and Shigaraki (two of Japan’s most influential ceramic lineages, known respectively for their rugged, hand-built forms and natural ash effects produced through wood firing), Tsujimura’s work avoids nostalgia, instead asserting a contemporary language grounded in physical risk and material intensity.

Tsujimura’s work has been widely exhibited in Japan and internationally, including participation in Artempo, Venice. His works are held in major collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco; the Miho Museum, Koka, Japan; and the Museum of Applied Arts, Frankfurt.

Works

2 works

Works from past exhibitions

2 works

Shown in

Publications

202620th Century Japanese Art – TEFAF 2026