Takahiro Kondo
Takahiro Kondo A Personal Comment Early in 2002 I received an application from a Japanese ceramic artist who wished to study a one year Masters Degree in jewellery design. I could see the applicant was very experienced in ceramics but I had reservations about his ability to translate his ideas to a jewellery scale and if it was possible to acquire the necessary skills in such a short time. His understanding of volume and form was clearly evident and his metallic glazes certainly did have possibilities for translation. For people without any grounding in metal skills, the early stages of manipulating the material can be a soul destroying and an aesthetically unsatisfying process. Undergraduate Degree students study full time for three years to become adequate, but it takes a lifetime of working in metal to be fluent and often this is in a very specialist branch of the subject. At the beginning of metalworking, objects produced are often technically poor. To create form from sheet metal is not easy as it relies on the use of tools to force the material to take a shape. This is vastly different from the initial stages of working with clay where the material responds to the spontaneous touch of a finger to make a mark. I made a decision to refuse Takahiro Kondo’s application after considering fully what the outcome might be for such a sophisticated maker. Undeterred Takahiro came to Edinburgh, joined the ceramics department and unperturbed by my refusal to let him study in my department, discovered glass. He decided to explore the possibilities of working with cast glass in our excellent glass department with the intention of introducing glass to his ceramics. Takahiro made a brilliant decision and went on to develop a remarkable body of work using cast glass and ceramics to portray different states of water such as ice and snow. He has continued this combination of ceramics and glass as his current body of work for this exhibition demonstrates. He wanted to come back to Scotland for this exhibition, as it was in Edinburgh he first discovered glass. The focus of this body of work is the combination of glass and ceramics reflecting his thoughts on interior and exterior worlds.
I learned later from Ruta Noreika that Takahiro expressed how grateful he was to me for making him think hard about his work direction. I was deeply touched when as he prepared to return to Japan after his wonderful Masters exhibition in Edinburgh he presented me with an exquisite ceramic vessel. I confess I was almost reduced to tears by this generous act and this beautiful white vessel is one of my most treasured possessions. It represents to me his indomitable spirit and reminds me of the resilience, courage and determination required to sustain a direction while being open to new ways of thinking. An example of his striving for the perfect solution is exemplified by a tea ceremony he organised with the National Museums of Scotland. Takahiro’s tea ceremony teacher came to visit him in Edinburgh and decided that the water for the tea making had to come from Skye. On the day before the ceremony they drove to Skye, collected the water and conducted a very special ceremony in the tearoom exhibit in the Ivy Woo gallery in the National Museum of Scotland using tea bowls made by Takahiro of course. Takahiro Kondo represents to me how we should take risks and take knocks and turn them into something positive. He has become an internationally renowned artist with exhibitions worldwide and seems always to be developing and pushing the scale and boundaries of his work. He may be grateful to me for inadvertently pushing him in the right direction but I bow to him for his remarkable spirit. Professor Dorothy Hogg MBE Professor Emeritus Edinburgh College of Art
Takahiro Kondo
Takahiro Kondo (b. 1958) is from Kyoto. The former capital and home of the Imperial Court for centuries, it is steeped in both politics and the arts even today. Takahiro’s family became involved with the arts when his grandfather took up ceramics as a young man.
Takahiro himself was an international champion table tennis player as a teenager, studied literature at Kyoto’s Hosei University, and did not come to ceramics until after the premature death of his uncle Yutaka, at age 50. Yutaka’s suicide led him to reexamine his life, and he began to make ceramics in 1985. “My inspiration is the four elements as the foundation of nature: earth (clay), water, fire and wind (air), and at the beginning blue represented water for me,” he said. For the first five years, Takahiro made pieces in traditional blue and white as it was part of his family background, but he had an inspirational moment when he went to Brazil for a show in 1990 and met many contemporary artists. The curvilinear blue line used to decorate the pieces he introduced in Brazil is reminiscent of Paul Klee and Joan Miro though he had never seen their work. One of the artists he first admired was the painter and Barcelona native Antoni Tapies (b. 1923), who focused on texture and was also influenced by these artists. Takahiro began to build slab work instead of using the wheel, combined with much more abstract and expressive decoration. To express the new rising skyline in Kyoto, he sought to harmonize the contrasting elements of contemporary and traditional building through the use of sharp angular forms and loose patterns in surface decoration. After Brazil, he tried using clay to paint, making flat works that were not fired. In 1997, he began using metal inlays and in order to portray the theme of the interior world versus the exterior world he used blue and white glaze on the inside and a mist glaze on the outside of his boxes. “I wanted to find a more realistic way of depicting water beyond just the color blue and realized that when you apply heat to metal, it bubbles, so I experimented with using metal in the glaze to create that effect in it. After eight years, I invented and patented in Japan
the gintekisai glaze in 2004 (“silver-mist” a precious metal glaze he is now well known for), to make it look as if water or ice were covering the pieces” Takahiro explained. At the start, the glaze included silver and frit but it tarnished so he developed a formula that incorporated silver, gold and platinum with frit so that the glittering transparency would be lasting. In 2002 he went to Edinburgh College of Art to do a Master of Design degree, and was fortunate enough to be supported in this through a grant from the Japanese government. Because he had worked with metals, he intended to study jewellery with the renowned Professor Dorothy Hogg. However, his lack of technical background in that field precluded that, so instead he joined the ceramics department. Almost by accident he visited the glass studio next-door and learned glass-making technique, greatly expanding the range of his work. He utilised glass to further portray different states of water such as ice and snow. Indeed, Takahiro’s first exhibition in January 2005 in Japan after Scotland was entitled 0 Degrees, referring to ice, a manifestation of water. The geometrically shaped works combined clay with a white glaze with a trace of celadon (he had tweaked Bernard Leach’s recipe for the glaze – and Leach had a connection to his grandfather, Yuzo) and arashi (hail) glass (for the cover of the pieces). The show was a huge risk, but it was much acclaimed especially by architects. After seeing the prehistoric standing stone circles on the Orkney islands off the coast of Scotland he began to work on a much bigger scale by using glass elements between large clay segments to create tall sculptural forms. Glass became an enduring component in his work, and he now has a glass-making facility at his kiln in Japan. Using Edinburgh as a base he visited numerous cities and art exhibitions in Europe and was exposed to many
new artistic influences there. Among the contemporary artists, those he feels the most kinship with are the Indian artist Anish Kapoor, Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, Chinese artists Ai Wei Wei and Cai Guo-Qiang. In his opinion the work of both Kapoor and Cai come from a similar place to his; they have a reflective quality, which is the result of their expression of tradition distilled through travel and interaction with the West. “How can you dig deeply into yourself and your cultural background and communicate with an international audience and elicit a response?” he asked. On turning 50 Takahiro introduced a gold-mist glaze, which he has also used on sculptural works including casts of his own head, which he has used to symbolize, among other things, greed and the profligate use of resources in the world today and its consequences to future generations. For him, water will be the critical resource in the 21st century, and he wonders what is being done to protect it. He may employ other media besides clay to express this, particularly glass. His most recent smaller scale work continues to explore the theme of interior versus exterior worlds in the form of double boxes, porcelain within glass. The exhibition includes many examples, both square and rectangular, of varying size and in several colours: blue, red, green and black. The color is consistent throughout each piece – the glass outer translucent box is of a deeper and brighter hue, often with a swirling pattern in the glass, while a mist glaze covers the surface of the porcelain box within, which is much paler in tone and has a sometsuke design inside. The boxes can be displayed covered or partly exposed. The mist glaze used for the interior boxes varies according to the colour, and the patterns reflect Takahiro’s earlier work – for example, circular or striated patterns on the blue boxes and geometric linear designs on the red.
A group of striking tall monolithic towers composed of rectilinear alternating glass and porcelain sections and echoing the colours and the motifs used in the boxes provide a strong sculptural counterpoint. In response to the March earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear disaster in Japan, Takahiro is planning to return to Orkney to begin another cycle of work that will elicit both a personal reaction and a reflection on our interaction with our land, our environment and whether these events have taught us what to do to protect our future. Now very well established as one of the most successful ceramic artists in Japan and well-known internationally, Takahiro will continue to push the envelope of his creative powers in his work. Margaret Tao New York, August 2011
Left: Monolith gold and silver mist over green 14 x 10 x 86 h cms Right: Monolith gold and silver mist over blue 14 x 10 x 86 h cms
Monolith gold and silver mist over green 14 x 10 x 86 h cms
Monolith gold and silver mist over blue 14 x 10 x 86 h cms
Monolith gold and silver mist over red 14 x 10 x 86 h cms
Monolith gold and silver mist over black and white 14 x 10 x 86 h cms
Green Mist with box porcelain, glass, silver mist 14.8 x 17 h cms
Blue Mist with box porcelain, glass, silver mist 34.3 x 18.5 x 13 h cms
Red Mist with box porcelain, glass, silver and gold mist 20.5 x 9.8 x 13 h cms
Green Mist with box porcelain, glass, silver and gold mist 9.5 x 8.6 x 9 h cms
Blue Mist with box porcelain, glass, silver and gold mist 8.8 x 8.5 x 9 h cms
Red Mist with box porcelain, glass, silver and gold mist 8.8 x 8.5 x 9.5 h cms
Left: Blue Mist porcelain, glass, silver mist 9.5 x 4.8 x 10 h cms Right: Blue Mist porcelain, glass, silver and gold mist 19.7 x 6.6 x 17 h cms
Takahiro Kondo
1958 1982 2002-3
Born in Kyoto Graduated from the Literature Department, Hosei University Master of Design and Applied Arts awarded, Edinburgh College of Art (supported by the Japanese Ministry of Culture Overseas Study Grant)
2003 1994
Awards Inglis Allen Masters of Design Award, Edinburgh College of Art Kyoto City Emerging Artist Award
Selected Solo Exhibitions 2010 Self Portrait, The Museum of Arts and Crafts, Itami Reflections, Barry Friedman Ltd, NY 2008 Transformations, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh Transformation, Barry Friedman Ltd, collaboration with Joan B Mirviss, NY Hamilton Art Gallery, Australia 2007 Imura Art Gallery, Kyoto Metamorphose Paramita Museum, Mie Nariwa-cho Museum, Okayama Kyoto Art Center, Kyoto TRANS-FORM, Spiral Garden, Tokyo 2006 Gallery Cellar, Nagoya 2005 Silver Mist, Barry Friedman Ltd, collaboration with Joan B Mirviss, NY Imura Art Gallery, Kyoto 2004 The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh 2003 Paramita Museum, Mie Prefecture 2002 Celestial Ceramics, Barry Friedman Ltd, collaboration with Joan B Mirviss, NY 2000 The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh 1995, 1997, 1999 Imura Art Gallery, Kyoto 1995 National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh 1993 Osaka Contemporary Art Center, Osaka 1992 The Azabu Museum of Arts and Crafts, Tokyo 1990 The Sao Paolo Museum of Art, Brazil
2010 2008 2005-6
1999 1996 1994 1992
Selected Group Exhibitions DOMANI, The Art of Tomorrow, The National Art Center, Tokyo Celebrating Kyoto, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Contemporary Clay, Japanese Ceramics for the New Century, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Japan Society, NY International Asia-Pacific Contemporary Ceramics Invitational Exhibition, Taipei Yingko Ceramics Museum, Taiwan Masters of Clay, Barry Friedman Ltd, organised by Joan B Mirviss, NY The Exhibition of Chinese Blue and White Porcelain and Modern Japanese Kondo Sometuke, The Palace Museum, Beijing The Kondo Family, Three Generations of Modern Blue and White, Eki Museum, Kyoto Selected Avant-garde Art, Kyoto City Museum, Kyoto Beyond Vessel, Robert McDougel Gallery, New Zealand 20th Century Japanese Blue and White, Kondo Family, Fitzwilliam Museum, UK
Americas
Selected Public Collections Sao Paolo Museum, Brazil Brooklyn Museum, NY Chazen Museum of Art, Madison WI Cultural Foundation of the New York Times, NY Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN Museum of Art and Design, NY Museum of Fine Arts, Houston TX Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence RI Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence KS Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven CT
Australia
Art Gallery NSW, Sydney Hamilton Art Gallery National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Japan
Miho Museum, Shiga Prefecture Paramita Museum, Mie Prefecture Museum of Contemporary Ceramic Art, Shigaraki
United Kingdom
Aberdeen Art Gallery Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh Ulster National Museum, Belfast
2002 2001 2000
Published by The Scottish Gallery and blue earth works to coincide with the exhibition Takahiro Kondo 5 October – 2 November 2011 Exhibition can be viewed online at www.scottish-gallery.co.uk/takahirokondo ISBN 978-1-905146-60-4 Designed by www.kennethgray.co.uk Photography by Shannon Tofts Printed by Stewarts All rights reserved. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced in any form by print, photocopy or by any other means, without the permission of the copyright holders and of the publishers.
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