Hands

Kondō Yutaka was born into one of Kyoto’s most prominent ceramic families. He inherited an exceptional knowledge of the medium while deliberately seeking a language distinct from that of the generation before him. His father, Kondō Yūzō (1902–1985), a Living National Treasure, became celebrated for the brilliance of his cobalt painting on white porcelain. At Kyoto City University of Fine Arts, Yutaka studied ceramics with leading figures including Tomimoto Kenkichi and Fujimoto Yoshimichi, as well as his father. This placed the young artist at the intersection of several important currents in modern Japanese ceramics: rigorous technical training, sustained engagement with historical Asian ceramic traditions, and the increasingly influential idea that the ceramic artist should develop an individual artistic language.

Rather than follow his father’s path, Yutaka increasingly turned toward stoneware, slip, impressed decoration, and irregular surfaces. His ceramics reveal an artist fascinated not only by the appearance of objects but also by clay’s capacity to receive and preserve traces—of the hand, of tools, of other cultures, and ultimately of human movement through the world

In the early 1960s, Yutaka spent time teaching in the United States. Over the following decades, he travelled widely and participated in research projects in regions including New Guinea, Afghanistan, and Korea. These experiences broadened his understanding of craft beyond the established categories of Japanese ceramic history. Yutaka belonged to a generation of postwar Japanese artists for whom increased opportunities for travel made it possible to encounter objects, techniques, and communities directly, rather than solely through museum collections or publications. Ceramics could thus be understood as part of a much wider history of human making.
For ceramicists, the hands are the primary instruments of making. The making of a vessel begins with touch: the hand presses clay, pulls a wall upward, compresses a rim, incises a line, or pushes a stamp into the surface. Even when tools intervene, the maker’s physical pressure remains fundamental. Yutaka’s lidded vessel in the form of a pair of hands, which also evokes the symbolic gestures of Buddhist imagery, elevates this intimate relationship between clay and potter into a wider context.

When the vessel is opened, its surfaces reveal impressed words in Japanese (hiragana) and English transcription (rōmaji) laid in with white slip. These inscriptions transform the vessel into a record of ceramic production. The dark clay body, white inlay and scripts initially lend the object the appearance of something ancient, perhaps even archaeological. On closer examination, however, this impression is disrupted by the content of the inscriptions. The technique Kondō Yutaka used to create this work is central to its interpretation.

During his mature career, Kondō became closely associated with techniques inspired by Korean buncheong ware, particularly slip-inlay and impressed decoration and their adaptation within the Japanese ceramic tradition known as mishima. In this process, designs are incised or impressed into the surface of the clay and the recessed areas are subsequently filled with contrasting white slip. Kondō developed this technique into an extraordinarily dense decorative language. Stamps, incisions, and other impressions disrupt the clay surface; white slip settles into these recessed areas, while excess material is removed to reveal the designs against the darker body of the vessel. Decoration is therefore not simply applied to the surface but physically impressed into it.

Yutaka thus creates what might be understood as a ceramic documentation of the present through the material language of the past. Historical techniques carry the memory of earlier cultures; the hands themselves evoke both the body of the maker and the fundamental act of making. The vessel brings these different kinds of traces together, allowing clay to function not simply as a material from which an object is formed, but as a surface on which experience can be impressed and preserved.