Where stars are born: Kazumasa Mizokami's exhibition in Massa

The halls of the Diocesan Museum in Massa are hosting an exhibition by Kazumasa Mizokami (Arita, 1958), one of the leading contemporary Japanese ceramicists, entitled Where Stars Are Born, scheduled from Saturday, July 1 (opening at 9 p.m. in the presence of the artist) until Oct. 4, 2023. The exhibition, organized in collaboration with the Four Crowned Association, presents 46 painted ceramic works, witnessing the refined technique and originality with which the internationally renowned Japanese sculptor reinterprets an ancient Eastern art. The works, with their apparent simplicity, express a worldview that projects the viewer to an archetypal future within us. For Mizokami, this is his second exhibition in the shadow of the Apuan Alps: in fact, he had already exhibited some of his works last year at the group show The Red Dot, an exhibition on contemporary Japanese art held at the Vôtre space in Carrara.

Born in 1958 in Arita, a locality famous in Japan for its ceramics known as “Imari,” Mizokami grew up in a porcelain kiln run by his family, but in 1982 he left Japan first for Mexico, where he taught sculpture, and then went to Milan, where he graduated from the Brera Academy. After graduation he settled permanently in Milan where he lives and works with numerous important solo exhibitions and participation in group shows to his credit, in Italy and abroad.

“Kazumasa Mizokami’s work,” explains Mauro Daniele Lucchesi of the Quattro Coronati Association, “is a dialogue with materials and techniques to indulge the poetic dimension that goes perfectly with the formal outcomes. It is the result of the abstract-design dimension of the artist, the latter who grew up as an heir to the great tradition of oriental ceramic work, where he perfectly dominates the moderation of terracotta with which he makes many of his sculptures. His works are not only poetic vectors, but are also works in a dimension of temporal suspension; the themes to which the artist gives form are those of the everyday, the circadian ones of the small things and micro-actions that punctuate the flow of human life.”

Explanatory in this sense are the works Girl Walking on Flowers and Blue Man while Mizokami’s poetic choice with respect to sculptural language remains clear; he eschews the monumentality and celebratory instance that have connoted sculpture for millennia, as a medium capable of handing down heroic figures and deeds for millennia to posterity. His sculpture conquers “horizontality,” breaking down the diaphragm between art and life, removing that elitist aura that often characterizes plastic art. The sculpture of this artist is also able to dialogue synergistically with the pictorial instance, with the subtle ability to harmonize forms and colors, integrate chromatic spectrum, volumetries and proportions (as in the works The Stars of Day, Clear the Moon, A Drop of Moon) Works that are declined with respect to the fraction of theviewer both according to horizontal dynamics and on the verticality of the wall, again testifying to a profound knowledge of fruitive processes (for example in the H2O series). “The Japanese artist,” Mauro Daniele Lucchesi concludes, “clearly testifies that sculpture is still alive and able to speak to a public increasingly distracted by digital media.”

The exhibition is open at the Diocesan Museum in Massa (Ms), Via Alberica 26, from July 1 to Oct. 4 with the following hours: until Sept. 3 Wednesday, Thursday Saturday and Sunday from 9 p.m. to midnight and Friday from 6 p.m. to midnight. From Sept. 6 to Oct. 4 from Wednesday to Sunday from 3 to 7 p.m. For information: e-mail:museodiocesanomassa@gmail.com, tel. 0585 499241, e-mail:a.q.coronati@gmail.com, tel. 371 6257954.

Where stars are born: Kazumasa Mizokami's exhibition in Massa

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