I wanted to make pieces that seem as if they were moving,
or living as if they were really breathing.
My work, it's so many things.
It's joyful, it's pop,
it's craft, it's Baroque, it's decadent.
This is King style.
My name is King Houndekpinkou and I'm a ceramic artist.
Paris is my base, it's the lab.
There is a long wall in my studio
that has a lot of images on it,
and these images represent things that influence me,
or bits of the history of ceramics,
or the music that I like,
or the type of pieces that I like and so on.
And if you had to print out my brain,
you would get that wall.
That's where I can just write whatever I feel.
It's as confusing as my brain works.
As soon as I have an idea, I can draw it,
and then I'll look at the drawings,
play with the colors,
and next step is choosing the right type of clay
to make the type of work that I wanna do.
Then I wedge the clay.
That enables you to take off all the air bubbles
in the clay and prepare the clay.
And then once the clay is well-prepared
and ready to be worked on I get on the wheel.
And that's when I start throwing the basic shapes
that will make the base of my artwork.
To make a piece it might take me
three weeks to two months roughly,
but it's more complicated than that
because I work on so many pieces at the time.
I work on 20 pieces at the time.
So while some pieces are drying,
I'm working on another piece
and then while some glazes are drying, I'm on another piece,
so it's never one piece.
In 2012 I went to visit a friend in Tokyo
and we went out one night,
and I met this Japanese girl who told me about pottery.
And at the time also, I was sort of, like soul-searching.
Like I was already involved in a career in communications
but I knew that my creativity could serve better causes.
And she told me about it,
and somehow that word pottery stayed in my mind,
and it kept coming back, coming back, coming back.
And when I came back to Paris
I found this Japanese pottery workshop
where I could start pottery for the first time.
And once I touched the clay,
it's almost as if, like, sleeping thoughts awakened
and that's when things changed for me.
It's almost as if you feel like there's sort of like
electricity coming from your hands
throughout your whole body,
and it awakens something, that seed inside
and then you question your whole life again.
I trained between Paris and Bizen in Japan.
Bizen is one of the six ancestral
cities for pottery in Japan.
There I was able to connect with Toshiaki Shibuta
who became my sort of, like, pottery father.
Him and his friends taught me the Kikuneri technique,
the spiral wedging technique.
It's sort of, like, prints in the clay's memory
the circular movements
and so it's easier for you to throw.
He taught me so many things,
for example, throwing slowly on the wheel
and taking your time while you throw.
You don't have to throw fast
and let the clay absorb each of your movements,
and be slow with it, be gentle with it.
My friends in Japan taught me so many things
about their culture first of all.
But also about life
because I lost my dad very early on,
like, when I was eight, nine.
So somehow through ceramics I sort of, like, found
other fathers and big brothers that could teach me things.
We are very different.
It's a different generation, different lifestyle,
different skin color,
but we connect thanks to the clay,
and for me that type of relationship is gold.
At the beginning I was only making functional pieces.
And because I looked up to my Japanese pottery fathers
I wanted to be like them,
but they also made me realize that no,
I cannot be like them and I should be me.
That's when I started to make more sculptural pieces
and realized that,
yes, my energy wasn't a potter energy,
it was more of an artist's energy,
someone that wants to create different things
and not make the same thing over and over again.
When I was younger I used to be bullied, like, a lot,
and was sort of, like, not accepted by my other peers.
And I was able to find,
like, security and peace in video games and virtual world
where I could control the character,
where I could choose the character I wanna be,
and go on an adventure.
Games like Zelda or Metal Gear Solid.
It's so amazing to be able to pull these concepts
and grow these concepts that you grew up with,
that you had in your childhood
and, like, drag them with you into your adulthood
and bring a message out of it.
I then was able to dig deeper in who I am,
where I come from, my roots
from West Africa in Benin with the spirituality and so on.
When I trained in Bizen I sensed the spirituality
in the way that my friends were making their works,
and that spirituality is highly infused
by the culture of Shinto.
And that made me realize
that that spirituality was very similar
to the one of voodoo in Benin in West Africa,
and both religion or system of beliefs,
they share the roots of animism.
And there was this, I don't know, like, it resonated in me.
It also feeds me as a maker
in my studio when I create my work
because I use clays from different countries,
from both countries too.
I don't have an academic background in arts,
so I just use my intuition to put colors together,
but I have sort of, like, developed my own theory about
the way I use color and one of them,
one of the theories is that for my work it's 80% texture
and 20% pigment
and that's how I work.
So what really brings life and gives life to the color,
or the piece really is the texture.
Working with the four elements:
earth, fire, air and water
is amazing because these elements
are older than us human beings.
And I truly believe that these elements
know more than we do.
It's almost as if I'm asking questions about my future
and I'm consulting the clay to gain knowledge out of it.
I've had people asking me if it tears my heart
to part from a work,
or just sell a work and see a piece leave the studio,
and I'm like, no.
Like the whole adventure of thinking of the piece,
and then making it,
and having it out there
is the whole fun for me.
Then what comes at the end of that process
is a byproduct of that whole adventure.