Mino-type stoneware vase by Kato Toyohisa (加藤土代久), signed on the reverse. The piece is without its original box.

The form is powerful and compact, with a broad, slightly faceted body rising toward a short neck with a deliberately irregular rim. A thick, almost milky white glaze seems to descend from the neck in taut runs, while the body carries a wave design built through deep browns, ferruginous oranges and intense white reserves. The grey-blue passages placed in the lower part and along the transitions are not merely cool accents: they create an internal circulation, as if the wave were moving around the vase rather than remaining fixed on its surface.

The material quality is essential here. The glaze forms a granular, vibrant, sometimes crackled skin, in which feldspathic whites respond to earthy browns and firing oranges. Kato Toyohisa has a particularly strong command of this chromatic register: the orange warms the surface without weighing it down, the brown gives structure to the wave, the white brings foam and light, and the grey-blue reflections introduce depth, breath and movement.

The wave belongs to one of the major symbolic repertoires of Japanese decorative arts. The term seigaiha (青海波), literally “waves of the blue ocean”, classically refers to a pattern of overlapping concentric semicircles arranged in a regular rhythm. The motif is attested early in Japan and appears in textiles, lacquer, ceramics, architecture and the decorative arts. In its traditional use, the wave evokes continuity, peace, abundance, happiness and good fortune, through the image of a sea extending without end.

On this vase, Kato Toyohisa does not reproduce seigaiha as a repetitive decorative pattern. He retains its underlying idea — the wave as rhythm, expansion and energy — and translates it into a freer, almost gestural ceramic language. The brown scrolls, white reserves and grey-blue passages suggest less a decorative sea than an inner movement within the material. The wave becomes a structural principle of the vessel: it animates the body, follows its rotation and reinforces the tension between mass, surface and light.

Kato Toyohisa (加藤土代久), born in 1962 in Toki, Gifu Prefecture, belongs to the generation of ceramic artists who have renewed the Mino and Shino traditions without limiting themselves to an archaeological revival of earlier models. The Mino Ceramic Art Association notes his study of historical works, his effort to establish a personal language and his research into glaze. His work stands within the legacy of Mino ceramics since the Momoyama period, but with a contemporary sensibility, powerful forms, relief-like surfaces and a highly physical presence of glaze.

His career has been marked by numerous distinctions in Japan, including the Shōroku Prize at the Mino tea bowl competition, the Chunichi Ceramic Art Award for a flattened flask with red-purple glaze, the Mino Kikyo Prize and the Tomoko Prize, created to support artists expected to carry Mino ceramics into future generations. A work by Kato Toyohisa was also acquired by the Sèvres Museum. He has held solo exhibitions at major Japanese venues including Takashimaya Osaka, Matsuzakaya Nagoya and Mitsukoshi.

Dimensions: height 34 cm, width 30 cm, depth 24 cm.