“Cornucopia: Ceramics from Southern Japan” includes more than 100 porcelain and stoneware vessels that vividly represent an era of highly diverse and accomplished ceramic production in southern Japan. A wide array of ceramic forms, including tea caddies, tea bowls, vases, rice bowls and incense burners, is on display in the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art through January 9.
Around the year 1600, a heightened fascination with the design and uses of ceramics, combined with advances in technology, launched an era of extraordinarily diverse and accomplished ceramic production in Japan. The center of this efflorescence was southern Japan, and in particular the island of Kyushu.
The exhibition spans from the late Sixteenth to the late Nineteenth Century, an era that marks the most diverse production of ceramics in Japanese history, encompassing hundreds of kilns that produced vessels for the Japanese market and for export to Europe and Southeast Asia. The cornucopia of Kyushu ceramics overflowed into markets throughout Japan and around the world for more than three centuries.
The Freer Gallery of Art is at Jefferson Drive at 12th Street, SW. For information, 202-633-1000 or www.asia.si.edu .
