Keiji Okushima

Keiji Okushima works primarily in hand-blown glass, embracing the material's molten fluidity rather than smoothing it away—he blows deliberately against symmetry, letting drips and the momentary gesture of hot glass in motion remain visible in the finished form. Alongside blowing, he uses kiln casting for sculptural pieces and his own suehari process, coating unfired clay directly with glass and firing it in his glass furnace. His signature technique is self-developed: he abrades the glass for grip, paints on urushi lacquer, presses on silver leaf at the exact moment the lacquer's tack peaks, then ages the silver and fires the piece to fuse the glass, lacquer, and metal into a single durable layer. The result is glassware with a mottled, patinated surface and an unresolved, fluid quality — tea bowls and sake vessels that read as much like geological formations as blown glass.