Kodai Ujiie (b. 1990, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan) is a contemporary ceramic artist whose experimental and visceral practice challenges the boundaries between craft, sculpture, and living matter. Known for his avant-garde, hand-built vessels and objects, Ujiie’s work explores themes of impermanence, repair, and transformation, frequently incorporating kintsugi-inspired lacquer mending as both a literal and symbolic gesture of resilience.

Working primarily with hand-building techniques rather than the wheel, Ujiie creates sculptural vessels that reject symmetry in favor of biomorphic asymmetry. His forms appear almost animate—swelling, ruptured, and in flux—suggesting bodies in states of growth or decay. Surfaces are richly textured, scarred, and layered, evoking skin, bone, scales, or geological strata. His distinctive use of celadon and other experimental glazes produces subtle translucence alongside an unsettling tactility, heightening the sense that each piece exists between fragility and endurance. Through these materially complex works, Ujiie reflects on the vulnerability and resilience of both human and environmental bodies, while emphasizing clay’s unique capacity to register memory, fracture, and repair.

Central to his practice is an ongoing interrogation of mono no aware, the Japanese sensitivity to the transience of all things. Ujiie often breaks and reassembles his works, or deliberately leaves imperfections exposed, transforming damage into an essential aesthetic and conceptual element. His lacquer seams, inspired by the kintsugi tradition, resist ideals of perfection and instead affirm the dignity of rupture, survival, and transformation. In his hands, repair becomes not only a method, but a philosophy—one that acknowledges loss while insisting on continuity.

Since establishing his studio practice, Ujiie has exhibited extensively across Japan and internationally, participating in major art fairs, gallery exhibitions, and design platforms that position contemporary ceramics as a critical field of artistic innovation. Most recently, he has been featured in Salone Raritas as part of the Salone del Mobile.Milano program, further expanding his presence within the global design discourse. His works are held in notable public and private collections, including the Miyagi Prefectural Jun Sugimura Museum of Art, and continue to attract attention for their haunting beauty, radical materiality, and conceptual depth.

Ujiie graduated with a BFA (2013) and MFA (2015) in Ceramics from Tohoku University of Art and Design, where he engaged deeply with both traditional Japanese techniques and contemporary approaches to clay. His upbringing in Miyagi—shaped by its seasonal rhythms, proximity to the ocean, and history of seismic instability—has profoundly influenced his artistic language. This environmental context informs the raw, organic quality of his work, which evokes cycles of growth, erosion, and regeneration, positioning his practice at the intersection of nature, memory, and material transformation.