Among the many Japanese ceramic artists working today, Ryoji Koie is the one at the most critical interface with contemporary art. Whether teabowl, vase, open-mouthed cylinder, tray, or bottle, Koie's chosen shapes are instantly identifiable as pottery yet they become departure-points for an extraordinary range of surface treatments from the indulgent to the austere.This volume illustrates and considers a body of work created by Koie during a residency in Seattle at the University of Washington. He located natural deposits of clay in a variety of local sites. Vases, vessels, trays, footed plates, and "stretched" plates were created in profusion, each subject to the artist's free-wheeling imagination in altering, throwing, ripping and tearing, and applying glaze and liquid clay or "slip".