Nakagawa Jinenbo Kiln

Nakagawa Jinenbo - born Kenichi Nakagawa in 1953 in Genkai, on Saga Prefecture's Higashi-Matsuura peninsula - left a job at a pharmaceutical company on a colleague's suggestion to train as a potter, spending three years from 1977 at the Karatsu kiln Kagamiyama-gama and funding his eventual independence by buying vegetables from local farmers and peddling them in Fukuoka. In 1982 he built his own split-bamboo, multi-chamber climbing kiln in Genkai, and by 1985 was showing work annually at Shibuya Kuroda Toen in Tokyo, working mainly in Chosen Karatsu - a Korean-influenced style in which a white straw-ash glaze and a black iron glaze are applied together and left to bleed into one another during firing, alongside brushed hakeme, white-slipped kohiki, and stamped mishima wares. He died in December 2011, not long after a 30th-anniversary exhibition of his work. His son, Kyohei Nakagawa, born in Genkai in 1983, apprenticed under him starting in 2009 and took over the kiln in 2012, continuing every stage of the process by hand, from digging and preparing the iron-rich local clay through throwing and firing. Because the Chosen Karatsu glazes are allowed to run and mix unpredictably in the kiln, no two finished bowls or plates carry quite the same pattern - a direct result of a technique built on letting the fire, not the potter, finish the surface.