From a studio in Tokyo, David Caon develops FUSHI with Gifu kiln Fudogama, a modular system in which a single Mino Yaki cylinder builds both a console and a lamp.
FUSHI is the latest release in the Craft x Tech Tokai Project, a programme that pairs international designers with Japanese craft masters to see what happens when an industrial logic is laid over a tradition that has resisted one for thirteen centuries. Caon's collaborator is Yohei Ito, third-generation head of the Fudogama kiln, working in a tradition known as Mino Yaki and animated by what the Momoyama period called Hyouge Mono, a sense of aesthetic rebellion and creative freedom that still lives in the kiln's everyday tableware.
The brief was scale. Mino Yaki rarely strays beyond the size of a tea bowl, and the collaboration set out to take it into the domain of furniture without losing what makes the craft itself.
The answer is a single ceramic module: a short cylinder, cast in a mould, dried, fired, dipped in Fudogama's heritage Oribe glaze, and fired again. The form is industrial in spirit; the surface is anything but. In the second firing the green glaze runs, pools, and crackles, leaving each cylinder with its own unrepeatable pattern of streaks and the soft caramel halo where the glaze gathers and burns at the rim. Stacked, those rims become the visible joints of the finished object, a visible echo of the segmented stem of bamboo that gives the project its name.
From this one component, two pieces emerge. The Console is 1400 millimetres wide, supported on four ceramic columns; the Lamp is a 300-millimetre stack on a flat plinth. A precise internal armature of steel and aluminium threads each module onto the next; a contrasting unifying element, a glossy dark-green cap, closes the top of the lamp and forms the top surface of the console. The same cylinder, scaled and re-configured, holds light and holds weight.
What the collaboration tests is whether mass-production and the wilful chemistry of an ancient glaze can occupy the same object without one of them winning. Caon and Ito let the modules arrive identical and let the kiln throw them into chaos. The result is two pieces of furniture that look, at a distance, like a designer's exercise in modularity, and on closer inspection like seven hundred years of pottery refusing to be standardised.
