The Echigo plain in Niigata Prefecture is a famous rice-producing district and an area of high-quality-sake production as well. Go along a country road across the broad, level rural district to the north, and you will reach a row of stores and houses on a street of Nakajo-machi. The mountainside of the town is called Hanyama, where you will find Mr. Katsuyuki Sakazume and his "anagama" or underground kiln. Take a look at his broad studio of placidity and a mountain of pinewood piled around the kiln for ceramic artwork production, and you will certainly feel an air of serenity. Yes, this is the very place for the job. This may sound a big surprise to you, but it is true that he usually continues to burn that kind of a huge pile of pinewood for over two weeks to realize his own ceramic artwork of "flame." His works of art comes from "firing and hardening" of extremely high temperature. From this process, he extracts mysterious and fascinating power beyond human knowledge.

On one occasion an art critic of France said very appropriately, "Every constituent element of the universe falls into the hand of ceramic artists as a raw material for their artwork." The texture of paintings has the power to captivate you. The fascination might not be depicted by any words. Likewise, the texture of earthenware has the power to fascinate you, very important in terms of the sense of sight and that of touch as well. It is a matter of course that the form or shape of the artwork also has the power to put you under a spell.

I hear Mr. Sakazume, after years of study, has now become a master-hand at how to build kilns as well as how to produce ceramic artworks. He was dispatched to the U.S.A. in 1979 through the sponsorship of Japan Foundation as a guest professor at New Jersey State-run Art and Education Center. During his stay in New York, he met Mr.Peter H. Voulkos, a world-famous ceramic artist, to devotedly cooperate with him to build his kiln, until finally he was favored with his warm friendship, deeply impressed with his artwork. I guess this is how he has learned the modernistic of ceramic art.

He is now standing at a contact point between the Oriental artwork of tradition and the Western artwork of modernistic, with Japanese mind and Western learning combined together. I would appreciate it if you could receive him with your warm hands and your cool head as well from this time forth for a while, and keep watching whatan attitude he will take from now on. (SUZUKI Susumu, Translation by SAKAI Takahiko)