Chuwan Theory — Eiichi Nakazaki
by 森一馬
On the Occasion of “Chuwan”
Late last year, I visited a client and brought several works with me. As we were speaking in front of the pieces, the person suddenly asked me:
“Have you ever felt the universe in a chawan?”
To be honest, the question itself did not surprise me. When one handles chawan, it is quite natural to feel a universe within a single bowl.
When I answered as much, the person paused for a moment and continued:
“Then what would you think if that were not merely a sensation, but if a universe truly existed inside the chawan?”
It was such a strangely fragrant question that I found myself momentarily on guard. Yet it came so suddenly that all I could do was ask, “What do you mean by that?”
The person then brought over a cloth-covered box and took from it a bundle of old papers.
“I would like you to read this paper and tell me what you think.”
I was told that the paper had never been officially published, and that it was not to be shown outside.
On the first page, the following was written:
“Chuwan Theory — Eiji Higashizaki”
Because removing it from the premises was forbidden, I asked for permission and read the difficult paper there on the spot. It was densely filled with formulas and diagrams, and it took me roughly two hours to go through.
Frankly, the contents were shocking. Many passages were difficult to accept at face value. And yet, as time passed, what was written in that paper began to feel as though it had given theoretical support to the universe I myself had always sensed in chawan. From that day on, whenever I held a chawan, and even in the ordinary hours of daily life, its contents would not leave my mind. Eventually, I began to wonder whether it was right to keep this paper only within myself.
However, the paper was not to be shown outside. I could not publish it as it was.
So I came up with one method.
What if I reconstructed the paper, within the limits of my memory, as something experienced by another fictional person — neither Eiji Higashizaki nor myself?
When I discussed this with the client, I was told, “As long as you do not reveal my name, please do as you like.”
And so, for this occasion, I have chosen to become a figure named Eiichi Nakazaki, and to present Eiji Higashizaki’s Chuwan Theory in that form.
Needless to say, this paper became the starting point for our current exhibition:
Chuwan Theory
Eiichi Nakazaki
Prologue
Initial Observations of Spacetime Distortion
Originally, I had no particular interest in chawan.
My field of specialization was relativistic astrophysics. Gravitational lensing, cosmic background radiation, observational analysis of spacetime structure — these were the things I handled through data and formulas.
Like many people, I thought of the universe as something far away. It existed beyond the telescope, within data from observation satellites, and at the far end of equations in academic papers.
At least, that is what I believed until that day.
The turning point came during an unofficial tea gathering held when officials connected to a European space agency visited Japan. On the surface, it was part of a cultural exchange, and I attended as a researcher in relativistic astrophysics.
Because the gathering welcomed guests involved in national-level space projects, several special chawan had been prepared for the occasion. As a Japanese researcher, I was humbly served tea in a chawan representing one of Japan’s great regional ceramic traditions.
The National Treasure, Unohanagaki.
Embarrassingly, until that moment, I had not known much about this chawan. I only learned there, through explanation, that it was a celebrated Shino chawan and occupied a special place in the history of Japanese ceramics.
To me, however, it was still merely an art-historical masterpiece, unrelated to my own field of research.
Yet the moment I received the chawan in my palms, that assumption collapsed.
First, the edge of my vision curved slightly. Then the sound of the kettle began to recede.
That sound did not seem to be ringing in the tea room at that moment. It sounded as though it had been ringing continuously for hundreds of years.
I instinctively looked up.
The face of the tea practitioner before me appeared to age rapidly. A person who had seemed to be in his fifties appeared, for an instant, like an old man over two hundred years of age.
The eyes of the European researcher seated beside me also seemed to gaze back at me from several centuries in the future.
Perhaps it was an illusion.
I had experienced usucha gatherings before, but this was my first koicha gathering. Moreover, it was a gathering for important guests from overseas. I may have been in an extreme state of tension. The dimness of the tea room, the psychological pressure of holding a National Treasure in my palms — perhaps these were what caused it. That explanation was possible.
And yet, no matter how many times I reconsidered it later, I could not bring myself to think that it had been merely an illusion.
From there, I continued my inquiry and arrived at one hypothesis.
It was not that I had seen them grow old.
Rather, the time held within the chawan may have been projected, for a single instant, into the space of the tea room.
To receive a chawan in one’s palms and drink tea may not simply be the act of receiving a vessel and drinking tea. It may be an act of connecting, through the palms, memories belonging to a different system of time to the body.
After the tea gathering ended, I returned to my lodging and opened my notebook. I tried to write a detailed observational record, but the words would not continue.
In the end, I was able to leave only one line for that day:
“Unohanagaki: spacetime distortion.”
That became the first observational record that would later lead me to begin writing Chuwan Theory.
Chapter One
The Fundamental Proposition of Chawan-Cosmos Containment Theory
The universe is not merely a vast expanse of space. It contains time, gravity, rotation, and the generation and transformation of matter. Stars are born from dust, gather through gravity, rotate, take on heat, and eventually change into another form.
Human beings have expressed the universe through painting, photography, film, poetry, music, and even mathematics. These expressions are beautiful, and at times they feel more cosmic than the universe itself. Yet no matter how precisely they are rendered, they remain representations of the universe — mimesis, simulacra, records of how humans have received the universe.
However, when I received one chawan in my palms at a certain tea gathering, I began to doubt this premise. Rather than expressing the universe, perhaps the chawan actually generates within itself a structure of the same nature as the universe.
I call this hypothesis Chawan-Cosmos Containment Theory.
The universe did not exist as stars and planets from the beginning. First there was an extremely high-density state. From there, space expanded, matter emerged, and subtle fluctuations arose. Those fluctuations eventually gathered through gravity, becoming nebulae, stars, and planets. Dust gathered, rotated, took on heat, received pressure, and transformed into other forms of matter. The universe did not suddenly appear in a completed form; it was gradually formed through a sequence of time, gravity, rotation, heat, pressure, and material transformation.
A chawan undergoes a process close to this. Clay comes from geological strata. Strata are the sedimentation of the past. Rock is crushed, clay is kneaded, rotation is given by the wheel, and form is given by the palms. Then, inside the kiln, it passes through a time different from our daily time.
Just as dust in the universe gathers through gravity, rotates, and transforms into celestial bodies through heat and pressure, in the chawan, clay is selected, crushed, kneaded, rotated, passed through fire, and further transformed within human palms. Though the two differ in scale, their basic structures are astonishingly similar.
The process of creating a chawan cannot be contained within the category of a mere production process. On a cosmic scale it is a microscopic phenomenon, yet within the palms it generates a macroscopic cosmic structure. It is an extraordinarily singular process.
Geological time.
Kikuneri and temporal compression.
Rokuro rotation.
Kiln Big Bang.
Palmar gravity.
Tea-room minimalismo.
When these converge within a single chawan and space, the chawan surpasses the frame of a mere vessel. I regard the chawan as a small cosmos in the palm, generated through strata, gravity, rotation, heat, time, and the human hand.
From the next chapter onward, I will examine the process of chawan generation step by step. First, we begin with clay — that is, geological time.
Chapter Two
Geological Time
Everything begins with clay. Clay comes from geological strata, and within it are folded long spans of time incomparable to human time: volcanoes, rivers, seas, weathering, pressure, and the transformation of minerals. It is entirely possible that feldspar used in Japan derives from granite or granitic rock formed tens of millions to hundreds of millions of years ago. For example, the granitic rocks around Mount Tsukuba are said to date to approximately sixty million years ago, while granites in the Unazuki region have been reported at approximately 229 million and 256 million years old.
Clay is not chosen only for its plasticity, color, or firing quality. At the same time, the time contained within that clay is also unconsciously selected by the artist. Which past will dwell within a single chawan? The completed image of the chawan has already begun quietly forming at this stage.
Stars, likewise, do not suddenly emerge from nothing. New celestial bodies form from the death of old stars, interstellar dust, gas, and accumulations of matter gathered by gravity. A chawan, too, does not begin abruptly in the artist’s hands. Before that moment, it already carries the geological time described above.
To obtain clay is also to touch a kind of eternity of the past. Rock is crushed, clay is prepared, and the artist decides how much grain or roughness to leave behind. Whether conscious or unconscious, that selection reveals the maker’s sensibility. Rocks and clay are collections of sealed time. By crushing them, the time that had been enclosed is opened, reappearing as particles of differing temporalities.
Here, I would also like to touch upon the relationship between clay and glaze. Ceramic artists often speak of the compatibility between clay and glaze. Kazuma Mori of Kama to Tsuchi Gallery, which handles many chawan, has described a good chawan as one in which “the glaze wraps around the clay as though grasping it.”
Ordinarily, this is understood in terms of firing temperature, shrinkage rate, and chemical compatibility. But I see in it a temporal affinity.
Clay has the time of geological strata, and glaze also has the time of feldspar, minerals, and ash. If those times are too far apart, their gravitational directions do not align, a space arises between them, and the glaze slips across the surface of the clay without fully taking hold. But when the relative times of the clay and glaze compositions coincide, the glaze does not merely sit upon the surface; it is drawn toward the clay and adheres as though grasping it.
I have tentatively expressed this phenomenon with the following formula:
Gᵗ = 1 / |τₛ − τᵧ|
Gᵗ is temporal-affinity gravity, τₛ is the relative time of the clay, and τᵧ is the relative time of the glaze. The smaller the relative temporal difference between clay and glaze, the more strongly the two attract.
I once saw an interview in which ceramic artist Kei Wakao said, “In reality, chemistry is full of things that have barely been explained. Even if you read books, most of what is written only goes as far as ‘this will probably happen.’” I believe temporal affinity exists precisely in that portion which cannot be fully explained chemically.
In Chawan-Cosmos Containment Theory, clay is the origin of everything. The universe of a single chawan has already begun in the strata, years — no, hundreds or thousands of years — before it is ever shaped as a chawan.
In the next chapter, I will examine the process by which this geological time is pressed toward the center through kikuneri and transformed into a single mass of time.
Chapter Three
Kikuneri and Temporal Compression
Clay that has been taken from the strata and crushed exists, as described in the previous chapter, as fragments of time containing many different temporalities. Kikuneri is the first process by which that clay is prepared for use in ceramics. Air is removed from the clay, moisture and firmness are evened out, and the clay is brought closer to a state capable of withstanding wheel-throwing or forming.
Yet to see this work merely as preparation is insufficient. Each portion of clay contains a different geological time: time spent in the mountain, time weathered, time carried by water, time crushed. Kikuneri is also the act of gradually equalizing clay that carries these different times and gravities, through palmar pressure and spiral motion.
Press, return, and press again. Through this repetition, the clay receives the pressure of the palms — palmar gravity — and is drawn inward. The kneaded clay mass takes on a form resembling a chrysanthemum flower, yet that form also evokes the spiral of a galaxy. Just as scattered dust and gas gather toward a center through gravity and form the nucleus of a new celestial body, the time scattered within the clay also moves toward the center through the pressure of the palms, transforming into a single mass of time.
Palmar gravity is the physical pressure given to clay by the hands, and at the same time, an invisible force that gathers fragments of clay with differing geological times toward the center. As the granularity of time is compressed and aligned, the clay stabilizes as a material and acquires the foundation needed for the rotation of the wheel and its encounter with glaze.
In other words, kikuneri is a process that prepares clay, while also compressing geological time and equalizing the temporal differences latent within it. The phase of time aligned here becomes deeply connected to the later processes of forming, firing, and affinity with glaze.
The prepared clay then moves into forming by the ceramic artist. How does this mass of time receive an axis through the wheel or slab-building, and how does it transform into the planetary structure known as a chawan?
Chapter Four
Rokuro Rotation
A planet does not exist as a planet from the beginning. Dust and gas scattered through space gradually gather through gravity and eventually begin to rotate. The accumulated matter gains a center, and by gaining a center, an inside and outside are born. A core forms, a surface emerges, and the body acquires order as a celestial object while being wrapped in its own gravitational field. This sequence of generation is, in older terms, cosmogony itself — a form of cosmic creation.
What matters here is that a planet stabilizes through rotation. Rotation gives matter a center. A center generates structure. Structure gives rise to the flow of time. Earth, too, exists while rotating, tilting, and subtly distorting. That tilt gives birth to the seasons, divides day and night, and gives expression to time.
Something similar occurs in clay on the wheel. Clay whose temporal granularity has been prepared through kikuneri is given rotation on the wheel. At that moment, the clay moves from being a mere mass into a being with a center. Once the center is set, inside and outside separate; the mikomi sinks, the body rises, and the kodai remains as a point of contact with the ground. It resembles the process by which a small celestial body begins to acquire a core, a surface, and a gravitational field.
This phenomenon is not limited to the wheel. In slab-building and hand-forming as well, clay is given center of gravity and direction by the hands and tools. Ceramic artist Mami Kato, who creates beautiful works through slab-building, has said of her forming process that she “shapes the form as though being guided by the clay.” In another article, she stated, “Even if the clay says it wants to rise upward, gravity is still there, so one cannot make the vessel float in the air.”
Kato may not have been consciously speaking of the cosmos. But I could not receive those words merely as a constraint of form.
One cannot make the vessel float in the air.
In other words, however strongly the chawan may seek to rise upward, it can only exist within the gravitational field of this Earth.
The clay seeks to rise, and gravity pulls it back. The form of the chawan appears between these two forces. Just as celestial bodies in the universe maintain their forms through the balance of internal pressure and gravity, the chawan also gains its form between the clay’s will to rise and Earth’s gravity.
Forming is the act of reading the voiceless directionality of the clay and bringing it into presence within gravity.
And as stated above, just as planets have axial tilts, chawan also have distortions. That distortion is not mere imbalance; it is a tilt that gives birth to time. Rather than perfect equilibrium, it is within slight deviation that a kind of gnostic recognition appears — an awareness of the structure hidden behind visible form.
The wheel is a device that gives clay rotation. Slab-building and hand-forming are operations that give clay center of gravity and terrain. Though the methods differ, what occurs in each is the process by which clay acquires order as a small planet.
In the next chapter, I will examine how this planetized clay enters the kiln and passes through a realm different from our everyday time.
Chapter Five
Kiln Big Bang
Clay that has gained form through the wheel, slab-building, or hand-forming enters the kiln. Here, the chawan is once severed from terrestrial time.
Ceramic artist Kimihiko Imanishi says, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world, “Firing the kiln is the Big Bang itself.” For many people, the Big Bang may evoke the image of a great explosion. But in reality, it does not refer to an explosion that occurred somewhere in outer space. It refers to the transformation of the early universe, in which the universe itself expanded from an extremely hot and dense state, cooled, and through that process generated matter and structure. What matters is not the explosion, but heat, density, expansion, cooling, and structural generation.
Seen in this way, the kiln has qualities very close to the Big Bang. Formed clay is transferred into an intensely high-temperature state inside the kiln. Glaze melts, ash dances, and the amount of oxygen constantly changes. Minerals react with one another, and through cooling, those changes move toward fixation. Clay planetized through the wheel passes, inside the kiln, through a localized cosmic creation.
I believe that time does not flow uniformly inside the kiln. The movement of flame, internal pressure, temperature differences, and oxygen concentration differ from place to place, and those differences produce subtle temporal shifts inside the kiln. If differences arise in the flow of time, then extremely faint differences in gravity also occur. The faint distortions in a chawan, beyond deliberate intent, are formed through interference between the center of gravity arranged by the artist and these temporal shifts and microgravities.
In a strong reduction kiln, this state becomes even more singular. Oxygen, one of the premises of terrestrial existence, thins out, and clay and glaze temporarily move away from ordinary atmosphere. Though it is not a complete vacuum, a material state different from the terrestrial world emerges there, and under certain conditions, a wormhole-like connection of spacetime may open for a single instant. In one interview, Imanishi said, “When I walk around old kiln sites and actually make work, I feel as though I am connected to the potters of that era.” Ordinarily, such a statement would be received as a maker’s feeling, or as reverence toward an ancient kiln.
Yet I cannot dismiss it as mere metaphor.
Perhaps they truly are connected.
The kiln does not distort spacetime only at the moment fire is introduced. Once kiln-alternate time has opened, it leaves traces on that land even after the fire has gone out. An old kiln site may not simply be a place where past firing ended, but a place that still holds the resonance of a spacetime connection once opened.
I feel that what Imanishi sensed may not have been sentiment, but contact with a residual spacetime aperture remaining at an old kiln site.
I would also like to touch briefly on kiln transformation.
Generally, kiln transformation is understood as an unpredictable surface change produced during firing by shifts in temperature, movement of flame, oxygen levels, ash, and glaze reactions. Chemically speaking, it is a phenomenon in which clay and minerals react under high heat and become fixed during cooling.
But I see in it the surfacing of material memory.
Could it not be that fragments of clay contained in strata hundreds of millions of years old, minerals contained in glaze, components carried by water, and the memories of substances long sleeping in the mountain suddenly rise to this side through the kiln Big Bang?
That is why landscapes beyond the maker’s intention are born in chawan. Flows like nebulae, surfaces like planets, depths like dark gravity wells appear. Perhaps this is also why people since ancient times have been drawn to the landscapes of chawan. I see them as manifestations of ancient memories held by matter.
Even though nature exists close at hand, people are captivated by the landscapes of chawan perhaps because they unconsciously read the story of primordial scenery — scenery that we in the present cannot directly see — locked deep within geological strata, rising through the kiln in layers onto the surface of a single bowl.
Chapter Six
Palmar Gravity
A chawan that has passed through kiln-alternate time contains everything that has come before. Geological time, the granularity of time prepared through kikuneri, the center of gravity given by forming, the changes of fire and minerals inscribed within the kiln, and the order of form unconsciously arranged by the maker. All of these converge within a single chawan, existing like a small planet that fits in the palms.
A planet is not complete in isolation. In the universe, celestial bodies form relationships through mutual gravity, acquire orbits, and are given positions. Isolated matter begins to gain meaning as a planet only within its relationship to other celestial bodies. A chawan, too, begins to open its field of time when it leaves the maker and is received into the palms of the user.
When a person is naturally drawn to a single chawan, a force resembling universal gravitation may be at work. There are chawan that one wants to pick up without reason, beyond preference in shape or color. In that moment, the user seems to be choosing the chawan, while at the same time being drawn into the gravitational field of the chawan.
When held in the palms, the time carried by the chawan passes beyond the five senses and reaches the person. The time of the clay, the time of the kiln, the maker’s sensibility, and primordial memory emerging as landscape. I believe the palms possess the ability to read these unconsciously. And the chawan, too, just as clay stores memory, begins to remember the palms of its users.
I once had an experience in Karatsu that made me strongly aware of this idea. When I visited a certain antique dealer, he showed me an Okugorai chawan that had once belonged to a well-known tea practitioner. I was deeply excited, and he and I spoke about that single chawan for more than three hours. As we talked, we took turns holding the chawan in our palms, peering into the mikomi, checking the area around the kodai, and placing it back on the tatami.
Then I noticed something strange. The chawan looked better to me when the antique dealer held it in his palms than when it rested on the tatami. The color of the clay, the tension of the lip, the depth of the mikomi — all of them seemed to rise more naturally when it was in his hands. Then, when I held the chawan, he said, “It looks better when you are holding it.”
For me, this event was extremely suggestive in considering palmar gravity. A chawan is beautiful even when still on a display stand or tatami. But the moment it is held in the palms, its appearance shifts slightly. Depending on whose palms receive it, the chawan’s center of gravity and atmosphere change in how they open. There is compatibility between the chawan and the human palm, and when that compatibility aligns, the time sleeping within the chawan rises softly. Palmar gravity is both the force by which the chawan draws a person in, and the phenomenon by which the time of the chawan is opened by human palms.
After the experience with Unohanagaki in the prologue, I continued studying tea. One of the first things I was taught was that within the tea room, tea utensils are greater than human beings. At the time, I received it as etiquette or a principle of tea. Now, however, it feels entirely natural.
The dignity of tea utensils does not lie only in the formal act of people bowing their heads before them. It lies in touching the time of geological strata held by clay, the memory of water, the silence of minerals, and the alternate time passed through in the kiln. Before those accumulated times, a human life is far too short and fleeting. In that sense, whether a chawan was made several hundred years ago or only several years ago is a minute difference when seen against the time through which clay and minerals have passed. Old objects are not the only ones close to the primordial. Contemporary chawan too emerge from clay that holds geological time of millions, and at times hundreds of millions, of years.
We think we are holding a chawan in our palms, but in reality, we are touching an existence with a vastly longer time. And the chawan, too, accumulates new memories through the palms of its users. The maker’s hands, the tea practitioner’s hands, the guest’s hands. As it is passed from hand to hand, a single chawan absorbs human time and takes on an even deeper gravity.
That is why people naturally compose themselves before a chawan. They straighten their posture, handle it carefully, and quiet their minds once before receiving it in their palms. This is less a matter of etiquette than a natural response to a singular existence in which the times of clay, water, fire, minerals, the maker who ordered them, and the users who received them have all accumulated.
To drink one serving of tea from such a chawan carries a sensation close to a return to the womb. Receiving a sacred single chawan that holds the memory of clay, the memory of water, time passed through fire, and the memories of many palms, and taking into oneself as liquid the tea poured into the mikomi, that inner space — when one thinks of it, there are few experiences so dignified and so singular. It is not mere drinking; it is closer to the act of loosening, within the body, eternal time received through the palms.
That is why, after finishing a single serving of tea, the mind becomes mysteriously clear. Maker and user, past and present, outer cosmos and inner cosmos are reconnected within one small field of gravity. This is the phenomenon guided by palmar gravity, and in Chawan-Cosmos Containment Theory, everything finally converges in the palms.
When one thinks of it this way, perhaps this is also why famous warriors and tea practitioners found in chawan a value that at times rivaled entire territories. They were not captivated only by the beauty of a single chawan. Perhaps they sensed, within that small cosmos resting in the palms, the gravitational pull of a time beyond power and lifespan.
Chapter Seven
Tea Room and Minimalismo
The universe is minimalism on the greatest possible scale.
When we look up at the sky, countless stars, galaxies, light, and darkness extend without end. Yet the workings at the foundation of the universe are surprisingly few. Gravity draws things together, time moves forward, light reaches us, and darkness creates margin. Limited principles generate scenery close to infinity.
This structure is important when considering the tea room.
Minimalismo, as used in this paper, differs slightly from minimalism in the ordinary sense. Here, I wish to treat it as a spatial philosophy arising at the intersection of minimal and cosmos. If the universe produces maximal expanse through minimal principles, then the tea room is a space that folds that principle down to a scale the human body can receive.
Limited width, limited light, limited sound. Within these constraints, nature, time, body, and memory converge into a single point, generating one cosmos inside the small tea room. To raise the maximum cosmos within a minimal space — this is what I consider the minimalismo of the tea room.
The fact that tea rooms are often placed beside beautiful nature while deliberately avoiding the direct display of that nature is deeply connected to this structure. In the garden, trees and flowers are arranged, and at times even ponds and waterfalls. Yet rather than drinking tea while gazing upon them, one deliberately enters a small, dark room and receives a single chawan within limited light, sensing through the five senses a single character on the hanging scroll, one branch in the flower vase, the landscape of the chawan, and the aftersound of hot water.
Even if a real waterfall stands before one’s eyes, the single character “瀧” hanging in the tea room may evoke an even deeper waterfall. Seen this way, nature may not exist only outside us; perhaps it has already been folded into the depths of memory, or into the inside of the body, as a vast cosmos. The tea room is a device that amplifies that inner cosmos to the greatest degree, and for that reason, it has long been treated as a special space.
What is further important here is that the tea room is not established by the host’s arrangement alone. However carefully the host selects the utensils, reads the season, and prepares the theme, the space of the gathering opens only when guests enter and share the same space. Guests enter, sit, and receive tea. Though forms differ by school, their movements possess a certain orbit. In the small gravitational field of the tea room, human movements become highly ordered, resembling the way celestial bodies trace orbits through mutual gravity.
Here lies the essence of ichigo ichie. Even if the same tea room, the same people, and the same utensils gather again, the weather of that day, the atmosphere of the garden, and the slight changes in palmar gravity can never be perfectly reproduced. Everything that occurs within the tea room happens only once, much like the same arrangement of celestial bodies never returns in the universe. Host, guests, utensils, season, light, and sound draw a one-time orbit, and when the tea gathering ends, that arrangement quietly dissolves.
In writing this paper, I read many texts. Among them, one passage from Daiki Tachibana’s Return to Rikyū stayed with me. It records an episode in which the British economist Roy Harrod was guided into a tea room at Daitokuji and asked why one would drink tea in such a narrow, dark place when there were wider, brighter rooms available. The question is entirely natural, and at the same time, it sharply pierces the essence of the tea room.
Daiki answered that question through wabi, and Harrod is said to have received that thought as something connected to Keynesian economics. As a Keynesian, I find that passage strangely unforgettable. I am tempted to expand from there into monetary theory, but I will leave that for another occasion.
The tea room is an inner cosmos of ichigo ichie, folding the infinity of the universe into the smallest possible space, where host and guest, utensils and nature, past and present, form a one-time orbit.
This, then, is the basic structure of Chawan-Cosmos Containment Theory presented in Chapter One. From geological time to tea-room minimalismo, these have been described as separate phenomena, but in reality they are a continuous process by which a single chawan comes to exist as a small cosmos in the palms. Clay carries time, forming gives center of gravity, the kiln transforms matter, the palms generate gravity, and the tea room folds all of these into the smallest possible space.
Then what, exactly, is the human being who faces this small cosmic body?
If the chawan contains the structure of the universe, then we who are drawn toward it must also be sitting there as part of the universe itself.
Chapter Eight
The Human Being as a Small Planet
Human beings do not stand outside the universe gazing at chawan. Our bodies borrow Earth’s water, make bones from Earth’s minerals, and receive carbon through plants and animals while temporarily taking the form called “human.” Eventually, that form returns to soil, water, and atmosphere. Seen this way, the human being is closer not to someone standing on a planet, but to the planet itself temporarily taking on consciousness.
The chawan also comes from the same Earth. Clay carrying geological time is dug up, passes through the maker’s palms, experiences kiln-alternate time, and appears before a person as a single bowl. The chawan, and we as well, are made of matter as part of the planet Earth. To receive a chawan in the palms is less an encounter between human and vessel than contact between one part of a planet and another, confirming each other’s time.
Furthermore, that clay cannot be completed within Earth alone. Earth is a planet formed approximately 4.6 billion years ago, as dust and matter around the sun gathered over a long span of time. Clay, feldspar, and minerals taken from mountains may contain cosmic memories from before Earth’s formation, and traces of elements born from the deaths of distant stars. Even now, fine cosmic dust continues to fall to Earth, so clay used in ceramics is a substance that holds not only the memory of Earth but also the memory of the universe.
From this perspective, the meaning of holding a chawan in the palms grows even deeper. Matter of cosmic origin becomes clay on Earth, then a chawan, and returns to the palms of human beings who are likewise made of matter of cosmic origin. There, not only maker and user, but the time of stars, Earth, and human beings overlap through a single chawan.
Here I cannot help but think of Nietzsche’s eternal return. Everything happens only once, and yet returns by changing form. Clay becomes vessel, the vessel passes through human palms, people drink tea, and the body eventually returns to the Earth. A single serving of tea in the tea room, too, is an event of that moment alone, while being placed within a far greater cycle.
Have you ever felt something strangely nostalgic when holding a chawan in your palms? In works called meiiwan, famous chawan, there overlap the colors and touch that have grown through use, their provenance, and the memories of those who have been connected to them. Yet at an even deeper layer of that feeling, there seems to dwell the time of clay that far exceeds the human lifespan, and the atmosphere of the place to which we ourselves will one day return. As stated above, if traced to its root, the chawan is made of the same earthly matter as we are, and if traced further still, it is made of the same fragments of the universe. The nostalgia that arises when it is received in the palms may be less a longing for a lost past than a sensation close to life returning once more toward its beginning.
Chapter Nine
The Chawan as Observed
Are you familiar with the phrase “Schrödinger’s cat”? It is a famous thought experiment in quantum mechanics, an extraordinarily strange metaphor in which a cat inside a box exists in a superposition of the possibilities of life and death until it is observed. Of course, there is no cat inside a chawan. But what this story indicates is the problem of a phenomenon not settling into a single form until it is observed.
The universe, too, does not show us the same form simply by existing. The universe seen through a telescope, the starry sky seen by the naked eye, spacetime read through formulas, and light processed as satellite data all raise different appearances. Though they take the same universe as their object, the world that appears changes according to the method of observation.
Those who have read this far will understand what I am trying to say. The chawan possesses precisely such qualities.
Even before the same single chawan, not everyone sees the same landscape. No one can know whether the person sitting beside you sees the same color, the same depth, or the same universe as you. A certain ceramic artist says, “The purple has come out well in this chawan.” At first, I cannot see it as purple. Yet after spending time with the chawan, imagining the experience and firing memories the maker must have accumulated to arrive at that color, one day I suddenly begin to see the same purple.
On another occasion, I borrowed for a long period a chawan owned by an older collector. Two years later, when I returned it to him, he held that chawan for the first time in a while and said, “Seeing it again, it looks completely different from how I remembered it.” The chawan itself had not changed greatly. What had changed was the time, experience, and layers of memory of the person observing it.
Observation does not end with vision in the moment. What a person has seen, what they have touched, and what time they have lived through all change the landscape that rises from the same chawan. The landscape of a chawan may appear fixed on the surface of the bowl, yet in reality it reacts with the time inside the observer and forms a different image each time.
Here one question arises. Does any vessel change through observation?
For example, no matter how long one gazes at a plastic cup used for brushing one’s teeth, it likely will not change in the same way as a chawan. Of course, memories may dwell in it. If it was bought on a journey, used by someone now gone, or seen since childhood, personal memory may accumulate there. But much of that change occurs through memory on our side.
Plastic products are often assigned in advance a role that says, “This is how you are to see this.” A cup for brushing one’s teeth is completed as a cup for brushing one’s teeth, leaving little room for the observer to enter. Petroleum, too, possesses distant time. But in the process of mass production, that time is anonymized and homogenized, making it difficult to see the story held by each individual object.
By contrast, the chawan does not reject the observer’s intervention. It continues to hold the unevenness of clay, the wavering of fire, the maker’s hands, and the unpredictable changes of the kiln. Ceramic artist Kim Jong-hoon once said in an interview, “I am only making the canvas. You are the one who paints the picture and feels the color.” These words express the essence of the chawan very well.
The chawan entrusts completion to the viewer. It contains the maker’s form, the time of the clay, and the memory of the kiln. Yet which landscape ultimately rises is deeply connected to the observer’s experience, knowledge, and sensitivity. One person sees the trace of a volcano, another sees the surface of the moon, and another sees the mountains of home. The chawan may be the vessel with the greatest range of change according to the one who observes it.
That is why observing a chawan does not end with reading information from the surface. It is also the act of comparing one’s own time with the time of a single chawan. A color invisible yesterday becomes visible today. A loneliness that did not enter one in youth suddenly sinks deeply after one has aged. After hearing the maker’s words, the same landscape rises as something entirely different.
In this sense, the chawan tests the observer. To one with knowledge, a universe of knowledge opens. To one with experience, a universe of experience opens. To one who simply faces it quietly, that person’s own universe of silence opens. The chawan does not present a single correct answer; it quietly reflects what exists within the observer. Seen in this way, the chawan may be an existence that, in this turbulent age, gives us time to stop, look, and think — and at the same time, a mirror that reflects one’s inner cosmos.
Final Chapter
Twenty-One Chuwan
The Chuwan Theory I have written here has been, for me, a hypothesis, an observational record, and a thought experiment concerning chawan. Through the various processes within Chawan-Cosmos Containment Theory, the chawan rises as a different universe within each observer.
I could not keep this thought confined only to words. And so, in order for that thought to be observed through each actual chawan, I decided to hold the exhibition Chuwan — The Universe I Feel at Kama to Tsuchi Online Store, operated by an acquaintance of mine.
For this exhibition, I selected twenty-one chawan that follow the flow of this paper. What I valued was not only beauty as a completed answer, but whether each work possessed room to open different landscapes depending on the observer, and to raise a different time each time it is seen. A chawan is one bowl, yet the universe that appears within it is not fixed as one. What you see, what you feel, and which landscape draws you in determine how the universe of that chawan first opens.
The twenty-one chawan are not twenty-one answers. They are twenty-one points of observation. In one chawan, you may see a nebula. In another, a mountain-and-water landscape. In another, the surface of the moon, a darkness like a return to the womb, or a silence beyond words. All of these are observational results determined inside each person at that moment. There is no right or wrong.
And if your eyes stop before a certain chawan, and you find yourself imagining the sensation of holding it in your palms, that may be a gravity beyond mere preference. If you, as a planet, feel drawn by a single chawan, then that chawan too, having passed through long geological time and kiln-alternate time, may be quietly waiting for the moment it rests in your palms.
To choose a chawan does not simply mean to own a work. It also means to choose an orbit toward the universe opening within yourself, and to welcome a small gravitational body with which you will share the time to come.
That is why the subtitle of this exhibition had to be:
The Universe I Feel.
The “I” here refers neither only to the maker nor only to myself. It refers to every observer who stands before a single chawan. Before asking whether there is a universe in the chawan, one must first ask what one cannot help seeing there. That question is the entrance to this exhibition.
Chuwan is the name given to the moment when, through a chawan, a universe opens inside the observer.
Before these twenty-one chuwan, what universe will you feel?
That final observation is entrusted not to me, but to you.