HIJIRI TOUGANE.

Hijiri Tougane is a Japanese ceramic and fine artist based in Toki, Gifu.

Born in Tokyo, she studied at a boarding school in the UK as a child and, after graduating from high school in Japan, went on to study art in the United States. She graduated from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco in 2012.

Her practice spans a wide range of expression — from life-sized ceramic figurative sculpture to vessels and abstract sculpture — and she works actively both at home and abroad.

My work moves around three axes: the passage of time, the inheritance of traditional technique, and the ambiguity of human existence.

In my signature life-sized ceramic figurative sculpture, I attempt to inscribe traces of life and the spirit into clay — as a form that endures.

In my vessel series — a contemporary reinterpretation of the traditional Mino technique "gaba-ikomi" — I develop work that questions the boundary between "a vessel to use" and "a sculpture to behold."

More recently, with the "Mononoke-tama" series, I have been working at the fusion of the artificial and the natural — expressing the contradictions and ambiguities of human existence, and our relationship with nature.