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It's not that the Japanese artist signed himself with a Chinese name, but rather that the Japanese adopted Chinese characters over 1,000 years ago (as did the Koreans, though nowadays the Koreans use Hangul almost all the time). The Japanese and Koreans then assigned their own pronunciations to the characters, or they adopted a variant of the Chinese pronunciation (sometimes both). Sometimes the meanings have diverged however. In Japanese usage, the character on your plate does by itself mean "humble" but here is likely to be used as a name or symbol of a porcelain maker, and pronounced "ken".
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