Taimei Morino is known primarily as a contemporary artist, and a successful one at that. His artworks are included in museum collections across the world (an example of his sculpture can be found above). But these plates tell a different story, one where the pretense of making “art” has slipped from his conscious mind. His plates instead hearken to Morino’s upbringing in the third generation of a family of potters, to his long and instinctive involvement with the feeling of clay. As a child, he likely wandered into his father’s studio only to be thrown a ball of clay to occupy his curious, active hands. There, the life spanning relationship between Morino’s hands and clay began. These plates are the most simple and direct example of his relationship to clay, a medium Morino knows almost as well as his own flesh and blood.

Morino's works are held in the permanent collections of various museums, including but not limited to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, The Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museé des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and The National Museum of Modern Art in both Kyoto and Tokyo.