3.5 Inch Small Round Oribe Green Bushuan Japanese Bonsai Pot #767 – Hand Formed, Foo-Dog Carving, Pronged Feet, Heavy Drip Glaze, Chop and Nail Signed

A small round pot from Bushuan under a heavy oribe green drip glaze. The heavy drip is what the kiln is known for, and it looks like chance until you look properly. Bushuan built the effect by layering glaze coat on coat, sometimes three or four and on the heaviest pieces as many as seven, then firing in a modern electric kiln to reproduce what the old wood-fired climbing kilns did. Glaze loaded that heavily wants to pool, skip and flood the foot. Getting it to break evenly instead means knowing precisely how much to put on and precisely what the kiln will do with it.

Green usually reads first on his work, with purples, yellows and blues moving beneath and around it. A shishi is carved into the side, the guardian lion that collectors here call a foo dog, and the pot stands on pronged feet. It was hand formed rather than thrown, and it carries a chop alongside a nail signature, the signature scratched in by hand while the clay was still leather-hard rather than pressed.

At 3.5 inches deep this sits in the shohin and mame range where most of Bushuan's work lives, deep enough to hold a reasonable root mass at that scale. A glaze this saturated is conventionally paired with deciduous or flowering material, where the colour has foliage to answer rather than bark to fight. With a carving on one side, it is worth deciding early which face is the front.