Vintage author's vase with a beautiful landscape, a mountain range and a snow-covered forest, porcelain, underglaze painting. Japan, the twentieth century is marked.  Fujii Xiumei is one of the iconic Japanese ceramists of the twentieth century. In Japan, it is not customary to name styles after one person, most often the directions were named after the area (Kutani village, Satsuma province). The fact that the Japanese have moved away from the centuries-old traditions that they honor speaks to the scale of the master. Fujii Xumei's vases are exhibited at major world auctions and are in museums, for example, at the British Museum in London.  Fujii Xiumei was born in the city of Arita in 1936. At the age of 15, he began working as an apprentice in a pottery workshop. In 1964, he exhibited his work for the first time at the Nitten exhibition, where he received his first prize a year later. In 1974, he opened his own furnace in Arita, Shumeigama, and became a very successful artist who won numerous awards at the Japanese Ceramic Art Exhibition, the Kyushu Yamaguchi Ceramics Exhibition, and was awarded the Minister of Education Award. He is known for his original decorating technique using painted leaves applied to the unglazed surface of porcelain.