“Where goes the white when melts the snow?” asks the brilliant Shakespeare in such a poetic way. MIWA responds to this question with his simplest, often functional ceramics and with his sculpted works without defined function. For if the English playwright manages to move us by evoking white, the most immaterial of colours, with flakes falling on a winter sky, MIWA makes them like Vulcan, the Greek god of the forge...with fire. The snow is created with a kiln, clay, enamels and a glaze associated with firing techniques that have made Hagi's reputation. Whether it be sumptuous, heavy, thick bowls - yet they evoke all the lightness of a cloud sitting over a lake, or the footprints of a mythical beast... Whether they be cold water pots, these mizusashi that are always used during the Tea Ceremony, vases of an unprecedented delicacy decorated with almost invisible petals, so ethereal in the April wind... Whether it be more sculpted forms with evocative titles, “White Peaks” (Hakurei), “Glow” (Mei) (cat.no.18) or finally “Asceticism in the snow” (cat.no.16), all these works go beyond classical canons of the Japanese aesthetic in regards to the functional object and the art of pottery. These works want to be “sculpted ceramics”, an expression magnificently chosen by MIWA.
“When I make a tea bowl, the Master tells us, it is not simply about drinking tea from it, but I hope that from this experience of the Tea Ceremony, the person who drinks can feel the depth of my aspirations as a creative being. A tea bowl is not only a form, it is also the voice of the heart.”
In the Tea Ceremony, before drinking, the guest turns their bowl slowly to admire it and to search for a place to put their lips, whilst carefully avoiding saving the most beautiful side of the bowl for themselves. Likewise, these works with white glazes sometimes only just tinted in a dark violet transparency or blue-grey or straw yellow do not deploy all their beauty at once. You must move about these water pots or vases, moving back and then approaching to admire the subtle games of proportion and perspective between miniscule Buddha (often self-portraits), alone in miniature, snowy landscapes that bring us back to the solitude of the artist before his life and creations.

Better than anyone, MIWA analyses his protean creations that can be separated into two categories, like the ying and the yang: serenity, previously evoked with the white works, and violence, expressed in practically all the other creations.
“My works, as MIWA explains to us, only use traditional procedures and materials. If, at first glance, one has the impression, they are different from classical pottery, it is because my approach and my sensibility are different to those of my predecessors. I am not puerile to the point of denying tradition. It is what has made me the man I am today. But tradition is not something that exists in itself, once and for all. It is something that forges itself and evolves in the course of history. It is only in a posteriori, in coming back to the chain of events, that one can discern what is of value, on which one can then attribute the name of tradition in all that it implicates in terms of respect. In this way, in the very heart of tradition, there is innovation. And in the creative arts, tradition is not something that should be protected, it is something that should be ceaselessly invented.”
Few artists coming from such a traditional universe, rooted in Japan’ s past, could demonstrate like MIWA such an intellectual acuity about his own creations. During our different interviews, if, according to his remarks, the Buddhist religion is of course anchored in the heart of his works moreover MIWA evokes,
“a deep connection between artists who, perceiving the presence of God in Life, depart on a quest for the Invisible beyond the Visible”, - the great Masters of the origins of western Modernity have shown this. From Goya flirting with the irrationality of the world, the tortured and mighty painter Van Gogh, from Munch screaming madness, Soutine leaving his violence to explode to the Expressionists, finally freed by the catharsis of abstract painting - all were studied by the Master of Hagi who was a student in Tokyo before becoming the twelfth of his kin.
For the series of busts of pain in black and white, he confides to us: “When I started I felt lots of heartache, nostalgia in my heart. I could not get out all this suffering to be exorcised. In this symbiotic act, when I shape it, it is always in sufferance and it is in creating these erotic and feminine forms that I can keep my vital equilibrium and inner peace in my conscience. There are lots of facets to me for I have a conscience exacerbated by my rapport between life and creation.”

Quoting in extenso MIWA who, better than anyone, has devoted all his years of creation and meditation to analyse this unique relation that associates his art to Eroticism and Death, as in literature was the case with MISHIMA and in cinema, with OSHIMA: “Japanese ceramics is traditionally the mode of expression of asceticism, derived from “wabi” and “sabi” notions of Zen Buddhism. Yet in all fine arts eroticism abounds. That Eros is present in all the arts, except in ceramics, is a singular abnormality that I would qualify as unhealthy. There you are, that is why I wanted to return Eros to its rightful place, a subject that no one had, up until then, attacked in an open way in the universe of Japanese pottery. For me, Eros represents the flash of flesh that gives Life. I searched to integrate this symbol in the Japanese headspace, the traditional Japanese aesthetic. But to express Eros necessitates a deeper reflection on everything that incarnates its opposite, to know suffering, affliction, and death... For Eros and Thanatos are like two sides of the same medal, as much opposed as inseparable. But I chose to accept Death rather than fear it, as it is unavoidable for all beings. And even if one gives form to divinities, immortals par excellence, whether they be Buddhist, Shintoist or otherwise, with the help of temporal materials, these representations are destined in the long term to be physically destroyed, to return to dust... Nothing surprising, nothing more natural, in those conditions, insignificant that I am, who cannot be anything other than a simple human being, to die, disappear from the surface of the Earth. To speak of Death, it is the act that aims to accept one's own death.”

As its name indicates, MIWA explains to us, “The clay sculpture is above all a sculpture. In my works, even if I include a sculpted dimension, I intend that it is pottery that stays mistress of the Aesthetic. In other terms, I want to make sculpted ceramics and not sculpture in ceramic. And to get to this point, it has cost me to an extent that is difficult to imagine, in terms of surveillance of each instant to master this indomitable flame that passes over the clay and the glaze.”
The more that MIWA makes advances with his work, the more he “plays with fire”, complicating and innovating in the mastery of materials as no one has done before him in the past, thanks to an almost hereditary and shamanistic knowledge of the kiln. The most recent works presented in this exhibition are all organic. They make you think of forms coming out from inside the human body, the brain or bubbling hearts, a man's erect member or the deep matrix of a female sex, a gut or warm, glistening internal organs. These works are intricate, associated with “lamp black” blocks, erect or curled, originals like prehistoric fossils or ammonites. These sculpted ceramics prove to what extent the artist is capable, henceforth, of transforming the ceramic into a second skin, in a bodily membrane or having a totally mineral (stone, rock, marble...) appearance. They prove that MIWA knew how to reinvent the art of fire in the image of this universal truth that is the perpetual movement of destruction and creation, to which all things must submit following divine providence and the laws of Nature.
“Contrary to sculpture or fine arts that is shaped by the lone hand of man, concludes MIWA, the art of ceramics certainly begins by an act of fine art creation of the same nature as with sculpture, but it continues beyond this by a transformation that intervenes independently from the artist's will, in the secret of the kiln: thus beginning a fierce battle with the flame in order to arrive at this mysterious outcome in unison with the laws of Nature. Whilst sculpture reveals an artificial dimension, the art of ceramics contains something mystical that goes beyond human knowledge. My works are part of this intrinsic Aesthetic of ceramics. It is the complete essence of my pottery.”