Matsuda Yuriko

Matsuda Yuriko (born 1943) is a female Japanese ceramic artist.^[1]

Matsuda Yuriko, Tea Caddy and Tea Bowl, The Brooklyn Museum

Work and accomplishments

She also acted as a visiting artist in the exhibition ‘Soaring Voices’, which focused on female Japanese ceramic artists. Her work resides in The Brooklyn Museum, The Yale Art Gallery, the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas,^[2] and the San Antonio Museum of Art, among others.

Themes and influences

Matsuda’s work, is often centered on body shapes, painting with bright colors, and hand-built. Her forms are irregular and playful, often dealing with themes of parody and exaggeration. Her works range from ceramic feet, teapots mounted with bananas, irregular vessels decorated with eggplants, ceramic buttocks, and roller skates, all hand crafted and colorfully painted.^[3] Her work shares elements with Dadaism, sharing playful elements with Man Ray and Elsa Schiaparelli. Her work often depicts decorations in red enamel with gold kinrande detailing, in the style of Imari porcelain export wares.^[4] Matsuda’s work subverts the traditional Japanese uses of colored glazes and gold patterning by applying them to a pair of porcelain feet, mounted on wooden blocks.^[5] Matsuda’s work are not designed for strict functionality. Rather, they diverge from witty cultural commentary to self-expression.

This break from tradition may also be linked to the exclusion of women from the ceramic arts in Japan.^[6] Despite Japan’s long history of ceramic arts, Matsuda’s work may be read as springing from the post-war alternatives to traditional Japanese forms and the apprentice system.^[7] As women studied ceramics in universities, they broke from the traditional apprentice system, which created functional and artistic vessels. The apprentice system relegated women to the outskirts of production, from decoration to adding glazes. Women remained on the periphery of the ceramic world until the educational and material post-war developments of broadly available university and the more common appearance of gas and electric kiln.^[8] After World War II, Japanese ceramic work also shifted in more sculptural, experimental, and expressive directions.

References