Kanjo Omata
Kanjo Omata (小俣冠丞, b. 1998) is the youngest maker in UNEARTHED's Tokoname show — Taiwan-born, institute-trained, and a pupil of Yokei Mizuno — shaping kyusu and gongfu-style pouring vessels with a restless feel for clay and surface.
About Kanjo Omata (Tokoname, Japan)
Kanjo Omata (小俣冠丞, b. 1998) is the youngest voice in this exhibition. Born in Taichung, Taiwan, and raised in Tokyo from the age of eleven, he trained at the Tokoname Tonomori Ceramic Art Research Institute and learned the teapot under the master Yokei Mizuno, also shown here.
He shapes pouring vessels, sharing pitchers and teapots with a clear attention to surface and texture, and his Taiwanese background shows in a leaning toward gongfu-style serving ware — the work of a young maker still finding his own handwriting in one of Japan's oldest ceramic traditions.
He talks about chasing surface — pushing a clay body past the classic “pear-skin” (nashiji) finish toward something rougher, almost like sharkskin.
On his work, from Marcel's visit
Short Bio
- Born 1998 in Taichung, Taiwan; moved to Tokyo in 2009.
- Graduated from Tokyo University of Agriculture (Department of Regional Development Science) in 2023.
- Entered the Tokoname Tonomori Ceramic Art Research Institute (とこなめ陶の森陶芸研究所) — the city's municipal training institute — in 2023, completing the programme in 2025.
- Studied kyusu-making in 2024 under the Tokoname master Yokei Mizuno (水野陽景), who is also shown in this exhibition.
- Works in kyusu (急須), tea pourers (茶注) and sharing pitchers (茶海), often in mogake (藻掛) and yakishime nanban (焼締南蛮).
- His pieces reach collectors through contemporary-ceramics galleries — including Gallery Utsuwakan (器館), Kyoto — rather than the established teapot trade houses.
- One of five Tokoname makers in UNEARTHED's June 2026 TOKONAME exhibition, and by far its youngest voice.
Omata works in the unglazed-clay idiom of Tokoname tea ware, making kyusu, tea pourers (茶注) and sharing pitchers (茶海) suited to gongfu-style brewing — a nod to his Taiwanese roots. He fires in mogake (藻掛, seaweed scorch) and yakishime nanban (焼締南蛮), and is preoccupied above all with surface, pushing the texture of his clay well past the classic “pear-skin” (nashiji) finish.
Placing a maker barely out of the training institute beside masters like Isobe and Mizuno is a deliberate choice: Omata is a glimpse of where this nine-hundred-year-old craft goes next. There is a quiet thread of lineage in it, too, for the teapot he learned came from Yokei Mizuno, whose work hangs only a few metres away.
