SEATTLE, WA.- The Seattle Art Museum opened The Kondō Family: Storytellers in Clay, a major exhibition bringing together 60 works by four artists across three generations. The show explores how each member of the Kondō family found new ways to innovate while navigating a storied tradition and serves as a retrospective of living artist Kondō Takahiro’s career. The exhibition runs from July 15, 2026, through January 3, 2027, at the Seattle Asian Art Museum.

“The Kondō family’s work represents a century-long arc of technical mastery and persistent experimentation,” said Aaron Rio, SAM’s Tateuchi Foundation Curator of Japanese and Korean Art. “Each artist pays respect to tradition and family legacy by challenging it and pushing at its edges.”

From wheel-thrown vases brushed with lively pictures of plants and landscapes to life-size self-portraits in porcelain, the exhibition showcases the evolution of the Kondō family’s artistic practice. The lineage began with Kondō Yūzō (1902–1985), who was designated a Living National Treasure by the Japanese government in 1977 for his mastery of sometsuke, a technique in which cobalt pigment is painted beneath a clear glaze and fired at high temperatures, creating a blue-and-white design. While Yūzō established the family’s stylistic foundation, subsequent generations—his sons Kondō Yutaka (1932–1983) and Kondō Hiroshi (1936–2012), and his grandson Kondō Takahiro (b. 1958)—have taken their own approaches to this legacy.





A LEGACY OF EXPERIMENTATION

The exhibition explores the Kondō family’s artistic innovation. Kondō Yūzō revolutionized sometsuke with a modern sensibility, taking inspiration from European painting and sculpture and the ceramic traditions of Japan, Korea, China, and Iran. His sons further expanded this vision: Kondō Hiroshi mastered the traditional family mode of painterly surface designs combining underglaze cobalt and overglaze enamels, while Kondō Yutaka broke away entirely, exploring other ceramic media and non-functionality. Across their work, each artist engages material, surface, and form in distinct ways, moving between function and nonfunction, continuity, and change. This spirit of originality was fostered by the influential teacher, Tomimoto Kenkichi (1886–1963), who taught all three generations the vital balance between technical mastery and personal style.

THE CONTEMPORARY VISION OF KONDŌ TAKAHIRO

A significant portion of the exhibition focuses on Kondō Takahiro, whose socially responsive works are grounded in the techniques he learned from his forebears. His practice is notably attentive to the power of nature and contemporary experiences, reflecting his belief in the power of art to affect change. Featured in the exhibition are two sculptures from his Reduction series, modeled after the artist’s own body and fired using glazes and metals. Through his process of creating these and other recent works, the artist probes issues of intention and unpredictability in response to the power of nature, human suffering, and disaster, including the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeast Japan and triggered a nuclear disaster at Fukushima. Also featured are six porcelain and cast-glass sculptures from Takahiro’s Monolith series, showcasing the artist’s unique ability to merge traditional marbling and firing techniques with massive, sculptural forms.

EXHIBITION ORGANIZATION AND SUPPORT

The Kondō Family: Storytellers in Clay is organized by the Seattle Art Museum and is based on Transcendent Clay/Kondo: A Century of Japanese Ceramic Art, originally presented by the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, and guest curated by Joe Earle.