Ken Matsuzaki has emerged as a leading figure in modern Japanese ceramics. Matsuzaki's work reflects the heritage of traditional Japanese folk pottery while showcasing the artist's creativity, intuition, and skill. Grounding his pieces in the Mingei (Folk Art Movement) pottery tradition, which emphasizes that the beauty of an object is found in its use, Matsuzaki has developed an individual style that honors and builds upon tradition while achieving innovation. Matsuzaki's striking shapes, with their endless variety of glazed and unglazed surfaces, are created through processes that he has developed over his thirty year career. The artist uses the effects of glaze, flame, and ash to produce a wide array of colors and textures on his ceramic canvases and layers of kiln ash, accumulated over a week of firing, to produce the diverse effects that cover the exteriors of many of his pots. These effects are at once both random and carefully cultivated. Like cultured pearls, Matsuzaki's ceramics result from a process instigated by man, but carried out by nature. In the same way, his works owe their creation to a mysterious and wonderful natural transformation that changes common materials into objects of beauty.

To achieve his unique wares, Ken Matsuzaki has combined traditional methods of Japan's Momoyama period (1568-1615) ceramics with new technology based on scientific understanding and extensive experimentation. He has not sought to "re-create" older works, but seeks instead to capture the spirit that moves through the great ceramics of the Momoyama period and instill it in his own original works. It is no accident that renewed interest in Oribe style ceramics from the Momoyama period has developed during the post-World War II era, as Japan has experienced an even greater degree of internationalization than in the past. International artists of the Abstract Expressionism movement often mirrored ancient forms of Japanese art such as Zen ink painting and calligraphy, meanwhile influencing recent generations of Japanese artists in turn. At the same time, the simple and unaffected, yet artlessly elegant, work of rural craftsmen was discovered and celebrated by men such as Bernard Leach, Soetsu Yanagi and Shoji Hamada, who disseminated the concept of Mingei around the world through their writings and work.

Although he has ventured beyond the realm of strictly-defined Mingei ceramics like those produced by his teacher Tatsuzo Shimaoka, Matsuzaki has remained firmly based in the vessel tradition and is the heir to these movements in both literal and spiritual ways. The single-minded pursuit of his vision of beauty, originality, and solid workmanship has gained him wide recognition and acclaim as one of Japan's foremost ceramic artists.