Tokyo University of the Arts or Tokyogeidai (東京芸大) is the most prestigious art school in Japan. Located in Ueno Park, it also has facilities in Toride, Ibaraki, Yokohama, Kanagawa, Kitasenju and Adachi, Tokyo. The university has trained renowned artists in the fields of painting, sculpture, crafts, inter-media, sound, music composition, traditional instruments, art curation and global arts.
Shōji Hamada was a Japanese potter. He had a significant influence on studio pottery of the twentieth century, and a major figure of the mingei (folk-art) movement, establishing the town of Mashiko as a world-renowned pottery centre. In 1955 he was designated a "Living National Treasure".
Takeji Iwamiya was a Japanese photographer particularly known for his depiction of architecture, gardens, and Japanese crafts.
Sueharu Fukami is a Japanese ceramic artist and sculptor known for his work in pale-blue qinbai porcelain. Fukami's abstracted, sculptural ceramic works depart from the traditional Japanese artisan traditions of his upbringing and instead explore natural phenomena and universal senses like "infinite space" through sharp silhouettes, sweeping curves, architecturally-inspired arches, and delicately-colored glaze. His minimalist approach to porcelains has contributed to defining and expanding the meaning, importance, and popularity of contemporary Japanese ceramics beyond craft art circles, most notably to fine art collectors and museums globally.
Kiyomizu Rokubei (清水六兵衛) is the name bestowed on the head of the Kyoto-based Kiyomizu family of ceramists. With over 240 years of history, the studio is now into its eighth generation. It is currently headed by contemporary ceramist and sculptor Rokubei VIII. The family was influential in the development and survival of Kyō ware.
The Hara School was a Kyoto-based Japanese painting atelier established in the late Edo era, which continued as a family-controlled enterprise through the early 20th century. The Hara artists were imperial court painters and exerted great influence within Kyoto art circles. They contributed paintings to various temples and shrines, as well as to the Kyoto Imperial Palace.
Unit 88-9 is a glazed stoneware sculpture by contemporary Japanese potter and sculptor Kiyomizu Masahiro, also known by the professional art-name Kiyomizu Rokubei VIII. This piece is held in the collection of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada.
Yō Akiyama is a Japanese ceramicist based in Kyoto. He was a late leading figure of Sōdeisha, an avant-garde ceramicist group that reimagined ceramics as nonfunctional sculptural practice. Akiyama studied directly under Kazuo Yagi, one of the founders of Sōdeisha, for six years. He later became a professor at Kyoto Municipal University of Arts and Music, where he is currently a Professor Emeritus, having retired in 2018. As an artist, he works primarily with black pottery, a technique that fires clay in low temperature, smoky conditions to create a dark effect. His predominantly largescale work is richly textural and abstract, emphasizing the earthy materiality of the work as well as its form.
Kimiyo Mishima is a contemporary Japanese artist, best known for creating highly realistic versions of "breakable printed matter" in ceramic such as newspapers, comic books and boxes out of clay. Mishima began her artistic career as a painter in the early 1960s, then started working in ceramics in 1971. At this time, she began to use the silk screen technique to print newspaper and ad poster images onto clay. Her use of manufactured objects shows parallels with the works of Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol, as well as postwar Japanese collectives Gutai and Dokuritsu Art Association.
Saburō Muraoka was a Japanese modern and contemporary artist born in Osaka.
Katsuhiro Yamaguchi was a Japanese artist and art theorist based in Tokyo and Yokohama. Through his collaborations, writings, and teaching, he promoted an interdisciplinary avant-garde in postwar Japan that served as the foundation for the emergence of Japanese media art in the early 1980s, a field in which he remained active until his death. He represented Japan at the 1968 Venice Biennale and the 1975 Bienal de São Paulo, and served as producer for the Mitsui Pavilion at Expo '70 in Osaka.
Kazuo Yagi was a Japanese potter and ceramic artist best known for spearheading the introduction of nonfunctional ceramic vessels to the Japanese pottery world. With an innovative ceramicist as his father, Yagi was sent to art school to study sculpture, instead of pottery. After graduating in 1937, he continued to train in the progressive circles, such as the National Ceramic Research Institute and the Japan Ceramic Sculpture Association. Following a short period of military service in 1939 and through the early postwar years, he was involved in a series of collectives that sought to transcend the traditional aesthetic values in not just ceramics but also in a range of visual media.
Keiji Uematsu is a Japanese sculptor and contemporary artist.
Futoshi Miyagi is an Okinawan artist and writer. He works in various mediums, such as photography, objects, video and text, to construct narratives on the subjects of sexual minorities and untold stories in history, often in relation to Okinawa. Much of Miyagi's earlier work is inspired by his own memories and coming to terms with his identity as a gay Okinawan man. Over the course of his career, Miyagi has increasingly expanded the range of his subjects to include imagined characters and historical figures. Miyagi is most known for his American Boyfriend Series, an ongoing project that addresses the topic of queer relationships through narrative form. The series, a culmination of Miyagi's multidisciplinary approach, consists of a blog, numerous video works, and a novel, and mimics the evolution of his oeuvre from semi-autobiographical to historically based fiction. Miyagi takes influences from a wide range of arts and media, including the work of feminist writers and artists Lucy Lippard and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, contemporary artists Félix González-Torres and Ryan McGinley, and classical composers Bach and Beethoven. For his photographs and video work, Miyagi has been recognized as a finalist for the Kimura Ihei Award and the Nissan Art Award.
Jun Nishida was a Japanese ceramicist. He is best known for his massive conceptual pottery pieces, which experiment with the material capacities of clay and the imaginative forms that ceramics could take amid the intense thermochemical conditions of the kiln. Throughout his brief yet productive career, Nishida pushed the boundaries of contemporary ceramics, challenging conventions of scale, abstraction, and method to produce a radically new visual language of pottery.
Born in Machida, Tokyo in 1936. Nakazato attended Tama Art University and continued his art studies at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Pennsylvania. He received the John. D. Rockefeller III Fund Grant and lived in New York City from 1966 to 1967. After returning to Tokyo in 1968, he taught at Tama Art University. Nakazato left Tama Art University in the wake of the student uprising and returned to the United States. He lived in Manhattan until his death on July 17, 2010.
Shikokai (Shikōkai | jp: 四耕会）is an avant-garde ceramic artist group formed in Kyoto in Japan in November 1947 that was active until 1956.
Toeko Tatsuno was a Japanese abstract painter, printmaker, and former professor at Tama Art University in Japan.
Ishihara Tomiaki (石原友明) is a Japanese artist born in Osaka in 1959. He graduated from Kyoto City University of Arts in 1984. Ishihara works in various mediums such as photograph, painting, and sculpture.
Yoshio Kitayama is a Japanese artist born in Shiga prefecture in 1948 and based in Kyoto. He represented Japan for the 40th Venice Biennale in 1982 and has participated in the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial and the Setouchi Triennial.
