RENZAN

Hayashi Shotaro started his education and career by studying with his brother Kyosuke who was a rather traditional Mino potter with the tiniest flair of modernism baked in to his pottery. Unlike his brother, Shotaro began to show an inclination to walk along a different pathway that had distinct elements of tradition infused with modern and sculptural elements distinguishing his work and himself from the large crowd of Mino potters. By pushing boundaries and definitions of archetypical norms, Shotaro began to create forms and ultimately surfaces that challenged the established criterion of the Mino traditions and creating at times objects that were carefully balanced vessels with both the essential elements of the function of the forms with a sense of sculptural, non-traditional renderings of everything from chawan and mizusashi to vase forms and tsubo. As the years passed, his pottery, his forms became more bold, more challenging and certainly more idiosyncratic leaving behind the more conservative pathways of what  one would point to as traditional yet adding to the tradition that has become more inclusive as potters test the boundaries and preconceived notions of what Mino means.    

Illustrated is such a pot, a simple, for Hayashi Shotaro, E-Shino mizusashi made to be a functional vessel but with a unique, brutalist and sculptural appearance that looks exactly like the natural, cataclysmic forces that create mountain ranges which is exactly what this piece is meant to recreate in ceramic. Exhibited and illustrated in a Daiwa show and catalogue in 1993, Hayashi Shotaro calls these forms Renzan-mizusashi or mountain range mizusashi and from the craggy, almost geological forms to the mimicked horizon lines painted in thick iron under the pure white glaze it is very much like looking past the peaks of one range, perhaps the Japanese Alps to the next succeeding one and its narration in form and surface and looking well beyond the traditional pot meant to hold water. I think it would be hard to convey the presence and real aesthetic impact of this Renzan-mizusashi with a single photo or a video slideshow but at some point this is my intent. For now I hope this picture gives some perspective of this provocative mizusashi that if nothing else makes it clear where Hayashi Shotaro stands in the field of modern Mino pottery, perhaps very close to the pinnacle.