This ceramic painting series is the second group of works that Rauschenberg made at Otsuka Ohmi Ceramics Company in Shigaraki, Japan, while waiting for his Japanese Clayworks (1982/1985) to be fired. For these works, Rauschenberg reworked prefabricated Japanese art ceramics that represented Western art icons, which he combined with images of contemporary Japan from his own photographs and gestural strokes of pigment.