/Takahiro_Kondo

‘Blue Mist with Box’, 2011, porcelain, glass, silver, gold mist, 9 x 8.8 x 8.5 cm

Interior Versus Exterior Worlds THE ART BY TAKAHIRO KONDO An internationally renowned artist with exhibitions worldwide, Takahiro Kondo always seems to be pushing the scale and boundaries of his work into unexplored territory.

Profile by Margaret Tao. Photography by Shannon Tofts.

AKAHIRO Kondo (b. 1958) is the fourth member of the three-generation Kondo family of famous ceramic artists in Japan where ceramics have been appreciated as an art form since the development of tea ceremony culture in the 16th century. Japan has the world’s oldest tradition of ceramics being made by named artists in individual studios. The centre of production of tea ceremony wares was the former Imperial capital city of Kyoto, which, by the 19th century, was an important focal point for studio ceramics. Today it is the home base of many of the major practitioners in the field.

Kondo Yuzo (1902–1985), Kondo Yutaka (1932–1983), Kondo Hiroshi (b. 1936) and Kondo Takahiro, were not only

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recognised as innovative artists by their contemporaries; Yuzo and Yutaka were also very influential to succeeding generations of ceramic artists in their role as teachers at the Kyoto City University of Arts.

Based in Kyoto, the Kondo family was of samurai heritage.

Their 19th century ancestor, Shoshin (1816-1858), was a Buddhist monk at the Kiyomizu Temple and a loyal supporter of the Imperial family. He was obliged to return to life as a samurai in order to marry the teahouse waitress he fell in love with. Thereafter that temple employed him. When taken prisoner by the armies of the Shogunate, he committed suicide rather than reveal the information they sought, and

‘Monolith’, 2010, gold and silver mist over blue, 86 x 14 x 10 cm

‘Red Mist with Box’, 2011, porcelain, glass, silver and gold mist, 13 x 20.5 x 9.8 cm 2

‘Monolith’ (detail), 2010, gold and silver mist over blue, 86 x 14 x 10 cm

Craft Arts International No.84, 2012

Craft Arts International No.84, 2012

‘Monolith’ (detail), 2010, gold and silver mist black and white, 86 x 14 x 10 cm 3

‘Red Mist with Box’, 2011 porcelain, glass, silver, 9.5 x 8.8 x 8.5 cm

‘Monolith’, 2010, gold and silver mist over red, 86 x 14 x 10 cm

‘Monolith’, 2010, gold and silver mist black and white, 86 x 14 x 10 cm

until the Bakufu government was overthrown, the Kondo name was in eclipse. The samurai were forced to adopt other professions after the Meiji Restoration in 1871, and in order to reward Shoshin’s loyalty, the Imperial Family bestowed the rights to a teahouse on the grounds of the Kiyomizu Temple to the two children from his second marriage. Yuzo was the third son of Shoshin’s 11 children.

Ceramics studios lined the street leading to the Kiyomizu Temple near where he grew up, so it was not surprising that he chose to enroll in the pottery wheel program at the Kyoto Ceramics Research Institute.

Yuzo set up his kiln, Nennendo, in 1924 in the Kiyomizu section of Kyoto and in 1927 embarked upon his career as a ceramic artist. In 1977, the government named him a “Living National Treasure” for his sometsuke pieces (blue and white porcelain), a designation which reflected his mastery of this traditional art form. Yuzo’s innovative

approach was to use a deep Chinese cobalt blue underglaze, thereafter known as the “Kondo” blue to decorate the simple forms with bold and expressive brushwork. He reinterpreted traditional motifs (pine, bamboo and plum, pomegranates, landscapes and Mt. Fuji) in an abstract form and in his later years combined gold with the blue underglaze to create strikingly original pieces.

Yuzo’s younger son, Hiroshi, graduated from the Kansai University of Art and won the prestigious Mayoral Prize at the Nagano Ceramic Competition in 1957. Like his father, he concentrated on sometsuke, incorporating gold and red glaze in his work, which has more formalised and intricate decoration. After his father died, the responsibility of running the Nennendo fell to him, punctuated by stints teaching abroad.

After studying at the Kyoto City University of Arts where he taught (from 1961) and nurtured a whole generation of top ceramic artists, Hiroshi’s older brother, Yutaka, began by working in sometsuke, but soon explored other techniques. His trips abroad enabled him to absorb diverse artistic influences. He was also inspired by the Kyotobased artists of the Sodeisha movement – including Yagi Kazuo (1918-1979), Yamada Hikaru (1920-2003) and Suzuki Osamu (1926-2001) – to create non-traditional more sculptural work. Sadly the weight of his heritage, commitment to teaching and professional status probably exacerbated his depression leading to his suicide at the age of 50.

Yutaka’s greatest impact was on his nephew, Takahiro.

Takahiro, who was an international champion table tennis player as a teenager and studied literature at Kyoto’s Hosei University, did not come to ceramics until after his uncle’s death. 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 exhibited 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 Catalan painter 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 and adopted a more abstract and expressive mode of decoration.

To express the new rising skyline in Kyoto, he sought to harmonise the contrasting elements of contemporary and traditional building through the combination 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 colour blue and discovered that when you apply heat to metal, it bubbles; so I experimented with using metal in the glaze to create that effect. After eight years, I invented and patented in Japan the gintekisai glaze in 2004 (“silver-mist” a precious metal glaze for which he is now well known), to make it look as though water or ice were covering the pieces.’ explained Takahiro. At the start, the glaze included silver and frit but it tarnished so he developed a formula that incorporated silver, gold and platinum with the frit so that the glittering transparency would be lasting.

‘Red Mist with Box’ (detail), 2011, porcelain, glass, silver and gold mist, 9.5 x 8.8 x 8.5 cm 4

‘Monolith’ (detail), 2010, gold and silver mist over red, 86 x 14 x 10 cm

‘Monolith’ (detail), 2010, gold and silver mist over black and white, 86 x 14 x 10 cm Craft Arts International No.84, 2012

Craft Arts International No.84, 2012

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‘Blue Mist’, 2011, porcelain, glass, silver and gold mist, 17 x 19.7 x 6.6 cm

‘Monolith’ (detail), 2010, gold and silver mist over green, 86 x 14 x 10 cm

In 2002 he attended Edinburgh College of Art to do a Master of Design degree, in a program sponsored by the Japanese government. Because he had worked with metals he intended to study jewellery with the renowned teacher Dorothy Hogg. However, his lack of technical background in the field precluded that option, so instead he joined the ceramics department. Almost by accident he visited the glass studio next door and learned glassmaking 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 2005 in Japan following his return from Scotland was entitled “0 Degrees”, referring to ice – a manifestation of water.

The geometrically shaped works combined clay with a white glaze containing traces 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 visiting the prehistoric standing stone circles on the Orkney Islands off the coast of Scotland he started to work on a much bigger scale by using glass elements between large clay segments to make 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 strongest kinship with are the Indian artist Anish Kapoor, Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, and the Chinese artists Ai Wei Wei and Cai Guo-Qiang. In his opinion the work of both Kapoor and Cai comes from a similar place to his own; 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 a number of sculptural works, including casts of his own head, which he has used to symbolise, among other things, greed and the profligate use of the world’s finite Takahiro Kondo resources and its consequences for 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. A mist glaze usually covers the porcelain box, which has a sometsuke design inside and is encased in a glass box. The boxes can be displayed covered or partly exposed.

Now very well established as one of the most successful ceramic artists in Japan and well-known internationally, Takahiro Kondo will continue to push the envelope of his creative powers in his work and to have an impact on the world of ceramic art, while following in the path started by his family.

Margaret Tao The works illustrated in this essay are from the artist’s solo exhibition at The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 5 October – 2 November, 2011. For further information visit the website: www.scottish-gallery.co.uk

‘Green Mist with Box’, 2011, porcelain, glass, silver mist, 17 x 14.8 cm Craft Arts International No.84, 2012

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