artist in residence

A working period in Japan, 2007

In 2006 I received a handwritten letter from Mr. Hiroshi Sado, Sado Hiroshi in Japanese, well known ceramist in Japan. He wrote me that he regularly invited ceramists to work in his studio for a three months period. This time he had the honor to ask me. I didn’t need long to think it over.

18 Years before that I met Hiroshi during a ceramic symposium in Finland, in which he participated together with the Japanese ceramist Takeshi Yasuda. My meeting with these Japanese and their culture, so different and strange for us, roused my interests for everything from Japan. I was enthusiastic about the invitation and I had positive expectations. Hiroshi may have had his own intentions, he surely expected a different outcome when he wrote me his letter.

...In the little ceramic village where I am staying, time is standing still. Kilns are burning day and night.
I expect to work in the studio I saw on the internet site, but that studio is already occupied by Hsuan-Yu Shih, a 33 years young Taiwanese. I didn’t know there would be another ceramist. In the same way, after hís orientation on the internet, Hsuan expected to stay in the bedroom I get to use. So he is working in ‘my’ studio and I am sleeping in ‘his’ chip wooden room >

on the roof, where he helped to hang wall paper and make it draught-proof with plastic folio during the days before my arrival. It’s winter and it is freezing severely. The coldness doesn’t stay outside, the burning stove can't keep the cold out. The paper sticks frozen on the thin walls and when the little oil stove burns my front, my food freezes behind my back. The water tap is in the open air and for the squat toilet I have to go more than 50 meters, outside the house, down the stairs, in all weathers.
Hsuan, also called Samuel or Mister Samson, only knows I am a friend of mister Sado and I will stay for a short time. Hé is the only real artist in residence, contracted by The City. I am a personal guest of Mister Sado, he was told.
The fact that two ceramists are invited at the same time while there isn’t enough working place for two, makes me feel unsure. What am I doing here? If my work, and indeed my person, is taken seriously, I need a studio just like Hsuan with enough room and good light were I can concentrate. From start to finish my working place is an unsure item...

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To avoid recognition, the name Sado Hiroshi is fictive. I named the village where I stayed The City.
Antoinette van Brussel