Reflections on “Transcendent Clay: The Kondō Family’s Path of Porcelain Innovations”

Stepping into “Transcendent Clay”, one is transported into the beauty of Japanese poetry and art, beauty which is inspired by imperfection, impermanence and the natural world.

Reduction 1, 2013 Molded and cast porcelain with cobalt blue and green under clear glaze and silver mist

The P.D. McMillan Memorial Fund, 2014.64

From the work of Kondō Yuzō, the founder of the Kondō ceramic legacy, a flower vase with blue-on-white harvest moon brings to life the transient beauty of the full moon as it briefly shows its white face through scuttling clouds.  While his grandfather reveals the beauty of the natural world seen from Earth, Kondō Takahiro takes us to places beyond.  The ethereal beauty of galaxies fills his tea bowl; his Monoliths transport us to the ghostly ancient past of the Orkney Islands; and in his twin images of himself from his Reduction series, the past, present and future swirl and coalesce.  

In Reduction: Wave, the use of kintsugi, the ancient Japanese tradition of using gold to repair broken pottery, reminds us that change and imperfections can illicit beauty.  On both these figures, the artist’s evocative gintekisai, or silver mist technique, inspires visions of dew drops, mist, tears and radioactive dust. Nostalgia mixes with hope creating the perfect incarnations of Japanese beauty.

Reduction – Wave, 2017

Marblized porcelain with silver mist overglaze Acquistion made possible by Dr. Phyllis A. Kempner and Dr. David D. Stein, Asian Art Museum

Surrounded by the Kondō family’s artistry, I cannot help but think of the poetry of Matsuo Bashō, Japan’s great 17th century poet, whose words, as in the following haiku, also captured the essence of Japanese beauty.

I wish I could wash 

This perishing earth

In its shimmering dew

– Matsuo Basho, translation by Michael R. Burch