Kazuya Ishida

As a child, Kazuya struggled to find his unique self, and yearned for a life outside the village of Bizen to discover more about the wider world. At the age of 15, he left home for Kobe, an international port city, for his middle school education. The three years in Kobe was enough for him to learn how special his home village really is. After his graduation, Kazuya implored the Living National Treasure Jun Isezaki to let him study as his apprentice. Learning fundamental Bizen Pottery techniques from the master, Kazuya then moved to the UK to get further out of his comfort zone. From 2015 to 2018, while teaching his skills and Japanese culture to students at Oxford University, he also absorbed the techniques and aesthetic sensibilities of modern Western art which he then began introducing into his own Bizen Pottery. Rahou, which means ‘spiral,’ is an outstanding technique expressing the beauty of centrifugal force in Bizen Pottery, and was inspired by his experience in the UK.