Ego Twice Removed

With the project Yokeina Yaki—Japanese for “superfluous earthenware”—I continue my pursuit of relinquishing creative control, stepping away from making as a vehicle for personal expression.

For this project, I collaborate with Japanese potters, each proficient in a particular articulation of what is broadly known as Raku ware—a ceramic tradition shaped by the Japanese tea ceremony. I ask them to set aside their usual practices—producing tea bowls and other ceremonial forms—and instead to create something entirely outside that formal language: cones, the signature archetype of my own work. Beyond this, I impose no further constraints. They are free to interpret the cone shape as they wish, working exactly as they are accustomed to, using their own local clays, glazes, and firing techniques. The brief is not a departure from their tradition but a reorientation within it.

In this way, the project becomes a deliberate decentering of the ego—something made all the more meaningful by the nature of the Raku process itself, which carries a similar spirit of letting go. In Raku firing, the outcome is never fully predictable. The potter submits the form to fire and smoke, then water and air, embracing chance as a collaborator. Raku perfectly embodies the spirit of wabi-sabi—the Japanese aesthetic rooted in humility, attentiveness, and reverence for the natural unfolding of things. To create without clinging to outcome, to let materials and processes speak for themselves, to accept imperfection as a kind of dignity—this is to enter a conversation with transience itself.

The values of wabi-sabi are inseparable from the worldview of Zen Buddhism, where impermanence (mujō), non-attachment, and the dissolution of the self are central. My own artistic ethos finds deep kinship there. By inviting others to make the work, and by choosing a technique that resists control, I commit to a double act of release. In this sense, ego is ritualistically removed.

The resulting cones give form to that gesture. In their making, no single author dominates, and no tradition is made to serve another. What emerges instead is a model of artistic exchange grounded in mutual respect and interpretive freedom—a metaphor for cross-cultural dialogue at its most generous. This, for me, is at the heart of what I do: the belief that artistic identity need not be singular to be sincere.