Haga Ryuichi is a potter who lives in the ceramics town of Mashiko in Japan. Digging local soil and minerals for the clay bodies and glazes has become a notable  trend in Japanese studio ceramics (in the contemporary context), which Haga is an important part of. Haga hardly uses prepared clay or glaze in order to achieve a result he wants. He has more focus on the connection with the local land and nature, and its transformation into ceramic ware. 

 

Having finished his master's degree in sculpture at Musashino Art College in Tokyo, Haga's artistic journey made an unexpected turn toward the very Japanese sense of ceramics. Drawing on 16th century Momoyama tea ware, Haga dives deeper into the time-honored aesthetics to reinterpret it with the raw materials that he found and prepared. The result is that the artist's unapologetic experimentalism seeps out from beneath the seemingly typical Japanese pottery ware, sometimes even in a totally abstract form.

Haga' s works have been shown at many exhibitions in Japan, notably at Mashiko Museum of Ceramic Art, and overseas.