This work suggests the image of a full moon, seen from between the clouds. The full moon seems to receive an injection of light from the narrow opening on the left of the object, which in turn illuminates it from the inside of the black clay. Harvest Moon was included in the exhibition Yagi Kazuo: Celebrating the Artist’s Sixtieth Birthday at the Isetan Department Store in Tokyo in 1978, which juxtaposed the ceramist’s old and new works. Yet, within Yagi’s oeuvre, known for its obuje-yaki (“objet pottery,” non-utilitarian clay objects), Harvest Moon is unusual. In fact, it might have been exactly because of that difference that Yagi decided to include it in the exhibition alongside other representative works such as Mr. Samsa’s Walk or Blind Tortoise.

Around 1968, when Harvest Moon was made, a curious episode happened which involved Yagi and the novelist Shiba Ryotaro. When Shiba was visiting Yagi, the latter stood under a 30-Watt lightbulb on the opposite side of a parterre room that he used as a reception room. Shiba proposed that “you should yourself get another lightbulb,” to which Yagi replied “This is about the amount of light you had inside a traditional house in the old days, so I intentionally got myself used to seeing and feeling things in this sort of twilight.” This attitude might be relevant to understanding the present work. On the surface of the black clay, one perceives the darkness of night. When there is light in the space inside, the celestial body appears to rise and form the shape of a full moon. The area on the upper left evokes a gathering of clouds. Yagi created this scene just from a careful modulation of light that hits the body of the work. The recess of the full moon is getting deeper from right to left, suggesting a range of light and dark expressed in the hazy moon. The opening on the left, about 15 x 2 cm in size, may correspond to what Yagi called the space of “seeing and feeling things.”

Moonlight hits the the upper part of the clouds and illuminates them. The multilayered peaks of clouds, touched by it, reflect the illumination back, emphasizing and highlighting the counters of the clouds. The left of the full moon is brought forward by the light that enters through the side opening. The unusual thing about this work is that Yagi did not recreate the full moon as a tangible, real shape, but rather evokes that shape through manipulation of the void that signifies the sky.

Thus the artist in this work precisely shows the type of delicate illumination characteristic of twilight that he was also used to in his everyday life. Harvest Moon is therefore not just a product of Yagi’s desire to create, but it was directly inspired by his sensitivity itself. In that sense, it is significant that Yagi opted to include it into the aforementioned exhibition Yagi Kazuo: Celebrating the Artist’s Sixtieth Birthday at the Isetan Department Store.

Yagi Kazuo (ceramist; 1918–1979)
Ceramist from Kyoto. As a co-founder of Sodeisha (Crawling through Mud Association), Yagi was largely responsible for establishing and popularizing non-functional objets as a major category of postwar Japanese ceramic art. Working in Shigaraki clay for much of his career, Yagi later turned to “black pottery” (kokuto). He taught at the Kyoto City University of the Arts.