SPIKY PLATE SUN M

Plates are usually designed in form and decoration to complement food, but this piece is a plate (5-sun size) that, in a sense, rejects being served on at all — a symbol of "anti-wabi-sabi". It asks what the user will place on it and how it will be styled, inviting a co-creation between maker and user's imagination.

Koga treats the plate as a canvas, illustrated only with positive words styled after graffiti — "Get Stand Up", "Stay Gold", "Silver Lining". They are messages Koga casts out toward a world suffering under the pandemic.
Studs covering the whole surface evoke punk, graffiti evokes street culture — both find their place on the canvas of tableware, developed within Japanese culture.

The SPIKY series, said to deliberately approach today's flattened way of seeing things with a sense of the foreign and unfamiliar.
Its form seems almost to refuse being picked up.
The protrusions radiating outward visualize — and make tangible — a force inherently latent within things.
It is rendered with a powerful expression, as if a force hidden within had burst out onto the surface.
Ceramics, a traditional craft nurtured over a long history.
Koga intends, by adding formal stimulation there, to give whoever holds it a fresh sense of surprise.