Artist
Kawai Kanjirō
Japan
The mingei master who kept evolving.
He was a technical perfectionist who abandoned perfection to find something more important.
Kawai Kanjirō began as a technically brilliant potter, mastering Chinese glazes. Then he met Yanagi Sōetsu and had a creative crisis. He destroyed much of his earlier work and committed to mingei philosophy. But unlike Hamada, Kawai kept evolving—from functional pottery to sculptural work, from traditional forms to wild experimentation. His home in Kyoto, now a museum, reveals a restless creative intelligence.
How might your work continue to evolve?