5.5 Inch Diameter Bushuan Round Bonsai Pot #989 – Vintage Hand Formed, Deep Glaze, Chop Mark

Bushuan is the art name of Shigeru Fukuda, who spent more than a decade as one of Japan's winningest auto racers before he ever touched clay. He took up bonsai as a hobby in his twenties, collected antique Chinese and Japanese ceramics alongside it, and by 1986 had turned that collection into a reference library of sorts, teaching himself to throw and glaze by studying the pots he already owned rather than apprenticing under another potter. He built that self-taught practice into Fukuda Pottery, a working studio that has since trained more than fifty students.

What he became known for is extremes, and the glaze is where that shows first. He built his reputation reproducing the effects of noborigama, the traditional wood-fired climbing kilns, using a modern electric kiln instead. The results read as chance, with running colour and crackle and kiln-change effects, but they come out of layering: three or four coats on a typical piece, as many as seven on the heaviest. Our record describes the glaze on this one as deep, and notes the pot as vintage and hand-formed. Green is usually the first thing the eye finds on his work, with purples, yellows and blues moving underneath and around it.

At 5.5 inches across and 1.5 inches deep, this is a small, shallow round. Shohin and mame are where the bulk of his work lives, and small is also where a heavy glaze is hardest to control, since glaze loaded that thickly wants to pool and flood the foot rather than break evenly all the way around. A depth like this suits a developed root system rather than one still building volume, so think of it as a display pot rather than somewhere to grow a tree on.