Toshiaki Noda (b. 1982) is a New York–based artist working primarily in ceramic sculpture, alongside mixed media sculpture, drawing, and painting. Born in Arita, Saga Prefecture, Japan—a historic center of porcelain production—he grew up immersed in ceramics and Japanese calligraphy.
Noda earned a BFA in visual arts with a focus on printmaking from California State University, Long Beach. After relocating to New York City, he established his career as an artist, centering ceramics as his primary medium. His heritage and printmaking training inform a distinctive approach to form, surface, and process.
Using hand-building, wheel-throwing, carving, stacking, and revision, Noda creates gestural ceramic forms that depart from traditional Imari smoothness. He often begins with familiar man-made objects—such as garments, shoes, boxes, bricks, and vessels—then distorts and reimagines them to explore irony, transience, humor, and fragility. His work exists at the intersection of pottery, craft, design, and sculpture, questioning conventional boundaries within ceramics.
Recent exhibitions include OV Project, Brussels (2022); Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco (2021); and Issues from the Hands at Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo (2017), with additional shows in New York and Milan. His work is included in The William Louis Dreyfus Foundation, and he is a recipient of a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship. His work has been reviewed in San Francisco Chronicle and Sculpture Magazine.