At exhibitions, ancient ceramics tend not to be the draw card that contemporary photography can be. With this in mind, The Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka, has combined the two together. The museum's collection features the Ataka Collection, a wealth of Korean ceramics donated in 1982, and a number of other objects given by the 21 Sumitomo companies. Of 965 cataloged items, 144 are Chinese in origin and 793 Korean (28 items are "miscellaneous"), making it one of the world's best Asian collections.

The theme of this latest exhibition is the lotus flower, and 64 ceramics from the collection have been chosen using 50 photographs by Tomohiro Muda as inspiration. Muda's conceptual approach of his present oeuvre is "spaces for prayer, forms of prayer."

Apparently the earliest lotus motifs can be found in ancient Egyptian art in sun-like configurations, but then there came the Indian, and with the eastward expansion of Buddhism, the Chinese variations. Just think of what is commonly known as the "lotus position" for the ubiquity of the flower's ostensible power to "train the body and the mind," positioning it into a seated upright configuration. Long ago in China, Buddhist patriarchs following their death, were eviscerated, set in the lotus position, lacquered and venerated as spiritual decoration.