The Kondō family of ceramic artists does not fit the mold of the traditional Japanese arts dynasty. Only three generations old, each generation’s work has diverged, sometimes radically, from the last. The Kondō Family: Storytellers in Clay at the Seattle Asian Art Museum covers all three generations with an emphasis on Kondō Takahiro, the youngest and most internationally renowned member of the family. Works by father, sons and grandson are grouped to show how tradition connects the generations, even as each pursued his own creative path. (Note on naming conventions: In the exhibition, names follow the Japanese convention: family name first and given name second. In this article, Kondō family members will be identified by their full names when first mentioned, and their given names after that.)
The Kondō ancestors were samurai who lost their profession when the Meiji Restoration overthrew the shogun and abolished the samurai class. Kondō Yūzō (1902–1985) was the grandson of the last samurai. His father, who ran a teahouse on the grounds of the Kiyomizudera temple in Kyoto, encouraged his son to learn a craft that would allow him to be his own boss. At twelve, he enrolled in Kyoto’s new Ceramic Development Center. At 19, he became an assistant to Tomimoto Kenkichi (1886–1963), who would become one of the most innovative ceramic artists of his era and a Living National Treasure.
Tomimoto traveled widely and was open to artistic influences from other cultures, attitudes he passed on to Yūzō and his descendants. After apprenticing with Tomimoto, Yūzō returned to Kyoto to establish his own ceramics studio. He taught at Kyoto City University of Arts and, in 1977, was designated a Living National Treasure in his own right. In 1967, he traveled to Iran to study the blue glazes used in Persian pottery. The exhibition includes a short film of his visit.
Both Tomimoto and Yūzō worked in the sometsuke tradition: round white porcelain vessels, decorated with subjects from nature in cobalt blue glaze. Both men drew inspiration from sources as varied as Korean moon vases and the sculpture of Aristide Maillol. Yūzō employed a spontaneous freehand painting technique to apply the blue glaze. His images of mountains, pomegranates and thistles feel fresh and modern.
Yūzō’s younger son, Kondō Hiroshi (1936-2012) trained with his father and followed him in the sometsuke tradition. Works by Tomimoto, Yūzō and Hiroshi are exhibited side-by-side, illustrating the continuity from one generation to the next, as well as their individual mastery of the technique. Hiroshi succeeded Yūzō on the faculty of Kyoto City University of Arts and maintained the family studio and kiln in Kyoto.
Yūzō’s elder son, Kondō Yutaka (1932-1983) studied with both his father and Tomimoto, but was even more adventurous and independent and his work looks very different from theirs. Yutaka preferred stoneware to porcelain. He was strongly influenced by Korean buncheong ceramics, creating textured surfaces of inlaid or stamped designs. His forms are non-traditional: his “Dripping-Ink Jar” is a rectangular vase with two necks. A restless personality, he left Kyoto to teach ceramics at Indiana University and traveled widely in Asia, the south Pacific, Europe and North America. Tragically, he committed suicide at the age of 50.
Hiroshi’s son, Kondō Takahiro (born 1958) didn’t plan on a career in ceramics. In his mid-20s, he was a successful professional table tennis player, but Yutaka’s death moved him to rededicate himself to the family legacy. He returned to Kyoto to study with his father and grandfather, practicing traditional wheel-throwing and adopting the blue-on-white porcelain sometsuke style for which they were known. His mastery of the genre earned him a solo exhibition at the 1990 Bienal de São Paulo. His encounters with contemporary artists there changed the direction of his work.
On his return to Japan, Takahiro began to experiment with other media such as painting. In his ceramics practice, he turned to hand-building, constructing vessels and small sculptures out of flat slabs of clay rather than turning them on a pottery wheel. His palette expanded from blue and white to a wider range of colors. He began work on a technically sophisticated glaze he calls “silver mist” incorporating precious metals fired at tightly controlled temperatures to form a veil of tiny dew-like silver beads on the ceramic surface. Several small but pivotal works from this period are exhibited together in a glass case near a group of “Monoliths,” his first large scale sculptures.
During the 1990s, Takahiro exhibited new work in Scotland and England. In 2002–03, he studied glass casting at Edinburgh College of Art. While traveling in Scotland, he encountered the Ring of Brogdar, a prehistoric stone circle in the remote Orkney Islands. Inspired to work at a larger scale, he combined ceramic and cast glass elements to create the “Monoliths,” taller than any single piece that could be fired in a kiln. This was the turning point in his career, when he transformed from potter to sculptor, from artisan to artist. His motivations expanded beyond the aesthetic and he has produced major bodies of work driven by spirituality, philosophical inquiry, and a sense of social responsibility. Several of these series are represented in this exhibition.
“Reflections” is a series of self-portraits cast in porcelain from Takahiro’s own face and head. He began the series at age 50, the same age as his uncle Yutaka’s death. Some are glazed in solid colors overlaid with the “silver mist” evoking tears or rain. Others are fired in a ritual known as noyaki, an outdoor bonfire of leaves and branches which produces an unevenly colored surface of smoke and earth tones. Both the ritual and the resulting coloration convey a spiritual connection with nature.
Takahiro felt compelled as an artist to respond to the Great East Japan Earthquake and subsequent Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. Initially, he returned to the pottery wheel to make almost 2000 small bowls, “Vessels for Life” to be given to survivors displaced by the disaster. In the following years, he made a series of nearly life-size figures cast from his own body, seated in the lotus position of meditation. Two figures from this “Reduction” series are posed against a video backdrop of Yuriage Beach, an area inundated by the tsunami. In the video, a faceless figure from the “Reduction” series sits facing the crashing waves. The sculptures in the gallery are glazed with the “silver mist” and one is made of marbleized clay which creates swirling patterns on its surface, reminders of the surging water and tears of grief.
Having returned to the wheel to produce the “Vessels for Life,” Takahiro went on to revisit the traditional vase form, enlarging it to monumental size, sometimes using over 100 pounds of clay. At that scale, the clay is hard to control; it can split or collapse under its own weight. These deformed “Large White Porcelain Vessels” became abstract sculptures, a commentary on the artist’s lack of control over nature and the unpredictability of the future. Even these conceptual reinventions of the vessel are rooted in the techniques Takahiro learned from his father. One is displayed alongside classically perfect examples by Tomimoto and Yūzō.
The Kondō Family: Storytellers in Clay is on view at the Seattle Asian Art Museum through January 3, 2027, part of a five-city tour of North American museums. This installation includes a wall-size interactive video allowing viewers to step ‘inside’ Kondō Takahiro’s studio. A catalog, Transcendent Clay: Kondō a Century of Japanese Ceramic Art is available.
