Bizen-yaki Tea Tray 「茶旅行」— Signed Studio Work, April 2000

Every Bizen piece is unique. But most Bizen pieces do not speak. This one does.

Before the clay was loaded into the anagama in April 2000, the artist pressed three kanji into its raw, leather-hard surface: 茶旅行 — Cha-tabi-kō. Tea. Journey. Going. The phrase does not translate neatly into English, and that difficulty is part of its meaning. It gestures at the ancient idea, present throughout Japanese tea culture since Sen no Rikyū's time, that preparing and drinking tea is not an act but a movement — a passage through a particular quality of time that ordinary life does not otherwise offer. The tray is named for what it enables, not what it is.

Beside the title inscription sits the artist's personal signature, pressed into the clay in the same moment, in the same hand. On the underside: 2000〜4. Together, these three marks — title, signature, date — constitute a full documentation that is virtually never found on Bizen utilitarian ware. This tray was made by someone who understood they were making something worth remembering.

The form is a tataki (叩き) slab — clay paddled flat, shaped by hand into an elongated oval with gently undulating edges that record the pressure of the artist's palms and fingers. No two dimensions are alike; the surface undulates slightly across its length. The underside preserves nunome (布目), the fine textile-weave imprint transferred from the cloth on which the clay was worked — a ghost of the making process baked into the body permanently. Vertical raised ribs run across the face — kazaritsukeimo (飾り付け) decorative ridges — creating channels that direct any condensation away from the objects placed on the tray.

The kiln transformed the surface into landscape. Dense goma (胡麻, "sesame seeds") — amber-gold specks of fused pine ash — scatter across the central field, richest where the kiln's fire path concentrated. Beneath and around them: hidasuki (緋襷, "scarlet cord") — the deep crimson-purple passages produced when rice straw wrapped around the clay burns away during firing, leaving its iron-alkali chemistry fused into the clay as permanent colour. The combination of goma over hidasuki on a single piece — both fire effects fully developed and clearly distinct — represents one of Bizen's most sought-after aesthetic convergences.

This tray is scaled and proportioned for dokushu (独酌, solo drinking) or two-person tea: a small tetsubin or hohin teapot on one side, two yunomi cups on the other, a chakin cloth folded at the edge. The slightly irregular form means no placement is quite symmetrical — which is precisely the point. In the Japanese tea aesthetic, the perfect arrangement is the one that accommodates the particular imperfection of its vessels.

Ships carefully from Hanoi, Vietnam, with full insurance. One piece only — title, signature, and date exactly as shown.