Masaki

Born in 1967,  Masaki finished graduate school in 1993 with a degree in urban planning.  He found a job at a think tank in Tokyo, involved in creating policies with an emphasis on coexisting with the natural environment and promoting local culture.

During his second year with the company, he had his first encounter with glasswork, which rekindled his desire to create. Purely as a hobby, he began to study pin blowing, a method that even a beginner could do alone. He was fascinated by the beauty of this simple technique, which uses water vapor from wet newspapers to inflate the glass, rather than blowing into it with the mouth.

Though working to satisfy people through city planning, his own life was far from that sense of satisfaction.  He began to feel a lack of connection between his vision and his daily life, so at the age of 30, he left the company.  He headed to Yatsuo in Toyama Prefecture, living a simple life in an old thatched house deep in the mountains, doing little more than cooking and tending the grass around the house.  He found that the excesses that had seeped into his life over the years were falling away. It was a time that reaffirmed something like the roots of human life.

Masaki learned that there was a glass rental workshop a short distance away, and he visited the workshop this time not as a hobby but as an apprentice, though he had no intention of making a career as an artist.  As he thought about what he was going to do in the future, he felt a desire to cut away the excess from within himself. He found the simple technique of pinblowing, which relies on natural forces such as steam, gravity, and centrifugal force to form the object, overlapped with that desire, and he felt pure joy in making things.

“Fictitious Garden” is the name of Masaki’s workshop, because it literally is a fictitious garden, with no buildings, and not appearing on any map. It exists solely in his imagination.

When he decided to start his career as an artist, he felt that the lack of a studio should not be used as a reason for not being able to create.

While working in urban planning,  Masaki focused on the greatest common denominator of happiness for a large number of people, and though this was a noble philosophy, it lacked specificity. In working in glass, he would be able to be more deeply involved in a single person’s happiness through creation.

The pin blow technique uses only simple tools and is not a difficult technique, yet it shapes vessels that are simple, yet have depth. Unlike beautiful things made with advanced technology, the beauty is created through the subtraction of excess, and by utilizing a minimum number of components. The same is true of daily life and Masaki attempts to create vessels as a symbol of this.

When making glass, Masaki keeps asking what he finds important.  To be simple. To be natural. Transparency.  We live in an age of overabundance, but we still seek out fundamental beauty.   In this spirit, Masaki reminds himself not to try to create a new type of work, and forfeit his stripped-down style. He dares to continue doing what he’s always done.  There’s no need to do anything new.