Ayaka Terajima
Ayaka Terajima is a Japanese artist born in 1987 who has worked between Japan and Germany and is now permanently based in Munich. Her name is inextricably linked to unglazed ceramics; indeed, the radical choice to leave the clay raw and porous—without the glossy finish of a glaze—is the most distinctive feature of her practice, alongside the blending of archaic Japanese imagery with the material culture of contemporary consumerism.
Her biography is defined by a shift that is both geographical and conceptual. After training in ceramics and traditional craftsmanship in Tokyo, Terajima moved to Germany in 2016—a decision made when her husband enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich (a move documented by the We Are Islands research project, which maps artists who have migrated to Germany from non-Western contexts). From that point on, her trajectory shifted progressively from ceramics as a craft discipline to sculpture as a field of contemporary art—a transition the artist herself describes as a genuine shift in artistic language, sparked by a specific performance-based experience: the 2018 installation Clay Stage.
