青幻舎 SEIGENSHA Art Publishing

I stand now at a crossroads
At the nexus between where I have come and what lies ahead

Through my years of zealous creativity—
Through those thirty years—
The guiding forces of fire and water were my bedrock

I stand poised to take my next step
It may carry me to a hill, and I may climb
It may carry me to a valley, and I may descend
I seek to go to greet what lies yet unseen
And that is why I have built my own kiln in Hanase
——from the book

In 2024, acclaimed contemporary artist Kondo Takahiro, who hails from a generations-old family of Kyoto ceramists, established a climbing kiln in Hanase in the hills outside the ancient capital. Why did Kondo choose a climbing kiln—which, with its dependence on the unpredictable workings of time and fire, might seem the very antithesis of the painstakingly controlled processes he had employed until then—as the base from which to embark on the culmination of his career? In this book of essays and photographs, the artist looks back on his thirty-year association with climbing kilns, from his involvement with those in Fukui, Miyagi, and Yoshino in Nara to the founding of his own in Hanase; he also reveals the inner struggles that briefly drove him to seek to break with ceramics and retraces the course of his evolution and thinking in the years since.

Kondo Takahiro has had an unlikely trajectory as an artist: Born in 1958 in Kyoto’s Kiyomizu district into a family of ceramists that began with his grandfather Kondo Yuzo, a designated Living National Treasure, he competed in table tennis at the international level before turning to ceramics at the age of twenty-five. His intricately detailed works, rendered using his signature Silver Mist glaze, have since garnered international acclaim. Public collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.