Yoshimasa Toba, glazed stoneware screen sculpture, circa 1986

Yoshimasa Toba (????), born in 1927 in Mukojima (Tokyo), belongs to the generation of Japanese ceramists formed after the war, influenced as much by tradition as by the emergence of modern Western art.
A graduate in Japanese literature from Hosei University in 1951, he also pursued artistic training at Bunka Gakuen. He built his first kiln in Bokuto in 1952, and exhibited in Shirokiya, then Matsuya Ginza, in 1954. After stays in Kyoto and Shigaraki, he settled in Tomioka (Tochigi Prefecture) in 1975, where he built a climbing kiln. There, he pursued a singular oeuvre, outside urban centers, combining formal rigor and graphic freedom. His work is informed by travels to Korea and Southeast Asia (1972), but also by his deep interest in modern European painting—particularly Matisse, whose soft contours, arabesque figures, and taste for textiles and decorative flat tints he adopted.
Toba was an active member of the S?deisha group, whose fundamental principles he shared: rejecting utilitarian ceramics, seeking an autonomous expression of form, and affirming the object as sculpture. This collective, founded in Kyoto in 1948, marked the shift in Japanese ceramics toward abstraction and the avant-garde.

Although he was not one of the five founding members of 1948, Yoshimasa Toba joined S?deisha in the following decades, alongside a new generation of artists. In the 1970s, he participated in the S?deisha group's annual exhibitions. His name is thus among the members of S?deisha who created a set of eight sake cups in collaboration with figures such as Suzuki Osamu, Kanaegae Kazutaka, and Tsuji Kanji. Toba's inclusion in this collective project, attested by the signature "Sodeisha," demonstrates his active role within the group. S?deisha provided him with an experimental framework and a network of like-minded artists. Like his colleagues, Toba asserts the primacy of form and personal creativity over function: he explores unconventional ceramic forms, often abstract, sometimes close to contemporary sculpture. S?deisha's influence is crucial to Toba's approach: redefining ceramics as an art form in its own right.
The piece we are presenting, a glazed stoneware screen measuring approximately 30 x 39 x 10 cm, is emblematic of this approach. The pleated volume recalls a traditional screen, but it is a sculpture in its own right, hollowed out in the center like a bas-relief. The female figure, almost sketched, is enveloped in a profusion of patterns reminiscent of fabrics, ancient ceramics, but also the lines and flat tints of Matisse. The work plays on hollows, thickness, and concealment. Ornament becomes structure. It is no longer a matter of containing, but of showing—a stylized, fragmented body, melted into decorative abstraction where other bodies can be glimpsed.
Yoshimasa Toba's works are rare outside of Japan. A few major museums preserve them, notably the National Crafts Museum in Kanazawa and the Tomo Museum in Tokyo. Some pieces have been exhibited in retrospectives linked to S?deisha, such as at the Kyoto Museum of Modern Art in 2023, but his name remains little known outside specialist circles, and his work, although essential for understanding the evolution of 20th-century Japanese ceramics, remains largely to be rediscovered in the West.
Signed tomobako.