Raku
A Japanese technique of low-temperature pottery firing in which the piece is taken from the kiln while still hot and cooled in the open air; also the ware itself.
Raku is both the name of a firing technique and of the pottery made by it. In the traditional Japanese process the piece is fired at a low temperature, removed from the kiln while still hot and allowed to cool in the open air. Raku ware is covered with a lead glaze; because of the low firing temperature the body remains soft and porous.
Raku is not just any “pottery with effects”, nor the name of a glaze: the term denotes a specific way of firing and the Japanese tradition bound up with it. That tradition was begun in the sixteenth century, in the Momoyama period, by the potter Chōjirō, the forebear of the Raku family. Its technical root is the three-colour sancai glazed pottery of Ming-dynasty China. The oldest work attributed to Chōjirō is a lion figure of 1574, and he presumably made his first tea bowls about 1579. The Raku tea bowl arose from the wabi aesthetic advocated by the tea master Sen no Rikyū.
