Our first contact with the work of Ochiai Miyoko (b.1946),
who lives and works outside of Kyoto in Shiga-ken was back in 1983 through the
JAPANESE CERAMIC TODAY exhibition. In the exhibition was a small T'zu Chou
style tsubo with a lively black fish, detailed with sgraffito on a nearly pure
white background, the piece and effect was quite elegant with an aire of
nobility thrown in for good measure. Over the years we saw her work here and
there including several pieces on our trips to Japan in the 1990s but it wasn't
until we first hopped on the internet super-highway that we found our first
Ochiai that was for sale; in fact one of our very first purchases, a T'zu Chou
floral vase over the pc was with Robert Yellin back in the late 90s.
Flash forward to the present day and we recently
stumbled on to a rather attractive Ochiai bud vase with the very same
decoration as was on the Kikuchi tsubo in the 1983 exhibition. Standing about
six inches tall this ko-tsubo has a rather graphic sense to the decoration and
the pot is both delicate and well thrown with a small, raised foot. I took a
number of photos of the piece and built this short video slideshow to try to
capture the volume and presence of the pot, hopefully the video will paint a
fuller picture.
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