One Thousand Pots, One Thousand Thoughts
Key information
- Date
- to
- Time
-
10:00 am to 5:00 pm
- Venue
- Brunei Gallery
- Room
- Japanese Roof Garden
- Event type
- Exhibition
About this event
Not beaten by rain
By Kenji Miyazawa
Not beaten by rain
Not beaten by wind
Neither snow, nor heat of summer
Such good health
No greed
Never aroused by anger
Always smiling in a peaceful way
Content with four cups of brown rice
Small quantity of miso and vegetable per day
Looking and listening to everything, without personal bias
And remembering it well
Living in a small thatched hut in the shadow of pine woods in a meadow
If there was a sick child in the East
He would go and nurse him
If there was a tired mother in the West
He would go and take the bundle of heavy rice off from her shoulders
If there was a dying man
He would go and comfort him saying ‘do not be afraid ‘
If there was a quarrel and court case in the South
He would go and let them see the triviality
In the time of long drought, he would shed hopeless tears
In the time of cold summer, he would pace up and down in despair.
No praise given
Yet no hostility from others
People might call him a good for nothing
But that is the kind of person I would like to be
One thousand pots, one thousand thoughts is an installation by artist and ceramicist Yozo Hirayama that commemorates the victims of the Tohoku earthquake and Tsunami of 11th March 2011.
Over a period of a year, Yozo has made one thousand pots as this number has a symbolic meaning in Japan, as it represents infinity or eternity.
One thousand pots thus stands as a marker and a memory of those who died in the disaster. Each pot is individually crafted in his palm, so they are all slightly different in size and shape. They are symbolic of all living beings across time and space, with the end result being a kind of ritual appeasement to the savagery of nature.
The inspiration for this work is the land, the mountains and the seas of Japan. As a child Yozo would fill his pockets with pebbles, and now, as a Japanese man living for many years in London, his pots re-link him to his native land in grief.
One Thousand Pots, One Thousand Thoughts
Contact email: gallery@soas.ac.uk