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Tetsuya Yamada creates spare ceramics. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis recently opened a mid-career exhibit of the Minneapolis artist’s work that is full of surprises. 

On first glance, the ceramics project a serene and meditative quality. On second look a punkish sensibility emerges, revealing Yamada’s youth as a skate punk in Tokyo.

Yamada and curator Siri Engberg guided me through Yamada’s exhibit, 

“Listening,” at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis

As Engberg explained the objects’ significance and how they relate to each other, Yamada added details. His comments were thoughtful and momentarily perplexing.

Engberg pointed out a piece called “Everyday City,” a large table covered in bone-colored plates and bowls and cups, set atop a plain wooden table. It was acquired by the Walker in 2019 and is one of the collection's signature pieces. At first, it looks like a carefully arranged store display. 

But Engberg pointed out that if you look closer, it’s a cityscape. Yamada was a skateboarder when he was a young man in Tokyo. He still has a skateboarder’s sense of moving through a city, venturing in places where skateboarding isn’t allowed. Then he has this to add:

“I was really influenced by the factory experience,” Yamada added. 

He is referring to an actual factory run by Kohler, which produces sinks, toilets and kitchen faucets. Yamada has twice studied at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Artists invited for annual residencies work alongside Kohler factory employees.

Two of the ceramic pieces — including “Everyday City” — from Yamada’s Kohler experience are on display. Yamada says he put in the same hours as the factory workers.

Returning to his studio at the University of Minnesota where he on the faculty, he found himself missing the labor. So he produced cups, plates, vases all seemingly identical but all independently hand-thrown.

He also produced another series of cups while at the factory. Some of them are on display at the entry of the Walker exhibit, neatly lined up on a long shelf. These are individually stamped, like industrial objects receiving a mark of approval from a foreman, but also like the stamps artists put on a limited series of lithographs. 

There used to be a lot more of these cups, but when he was finished making them at Kohler in 2003, he gave them away. 

Calling the piece “Cup Exchange,” Yamada invited visitors to bring their own ceramic cups, store-bought, and swap them out for one of his. He will be doing this again on Thursday, Feb. 15 at 5 p.m. for anyone who brings a cup to the Walker.

Not all of Yamada’s work is “everyday.” Some are tubes, hung from a nail as though melting. One looks like a painting: a square ceramic canvas painted with stripes of glaze, which he then allowed to drip in the kiln, producing an image like the windows of a medieval building which looks deliberately created. 

Elsewhere in the gallery, a video plays, looking like images of abstract motion, until you occasionally see the wheels of a skateboard — the video was taken by pointing the camera at the ground as Yamada skateboarded. 

Alongside it is another seemingly abstract piece, a flat ceramic square with a mound and a line rising from it. It’s a model of a skate park. You can sit near these on a wooden bench with what appear to be metal cushions, dented as though crushed from years of use. They’re not metal. They’re ceramic and surprisingly comfortable.

Yamada’s work is meditative and stately, perhaps owing to his interest in traditional Japanese arts like the tea ceremony. But the Tokyo skate punk influence is never far beneath the surface, creating work that seems designed to throw viewers off balance, seeming to be one thing and revealing itself to be another.

This sensibility is clearest at the end of the exhibit with a slide show and posters from a series of pop-up shows Yamada did around Minneapolis. In the DIY, or “Do It Yourself,” spirit of punk, he would take over unused spaces for a few days, talking the landlords into letting him use them for free. Then he would photocopy fliers, with fonts borrowed from the punk band, Crass, to invite people to come into old laundromats and gas stations to see his work.

He told me that once an inspector came by to see what he was doing. “You’re gonna just do a private party, right? Just a few, a few people?” 

“230 people showed up,” Yamada said. 

Max Sparber

Author

Tetsuya Yamada's exhibit “Listening” at the Walker Art Center blends traditional ceramics with skate punk culture, reflecting his unique artistic journey.

Tetsuya Yamada's exhibit "Listening" at the Walker Art Center blends traditional ceramics with skate punk culture, reflecting his unique artistic journey.

Skate punk ceramics: Tetsuya Yamada at Walker Art Center

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