Compressed Tradition - Kazu & Hiroshi Yamada
圧縮された伝統
 

For many years, during visits to Kazu-san and Hiroshi-san at their home and studios in Fukui Prefecture, I had asked whether they might one day consider making an exhibition together. Kazu-san was always resistant — not because he disliked the idea, but because he felt, quite rightly, that father and son should first be allowed to establish themselves as artists in their own right.

That position always made sense to me. Hiroshi’s work needed space to be understood independently of his father’s formidable career, just as Kazu’s own practice had been built through a lifetime of questioning, departure and reinvention.

Then, over breakfast at Kazu-san’s home in January 2025, the answer changed.

“Let’s do it.”

From that moment, this exhibition began.

Since then, both artists have been making and setting aside work specifically for this project. The result is the first exhibition dedicated solely to bringing their practices together: not as master and successor, nor simply as father and son, but as two fully formed artists whose work has developed through different temperaments, different instincts and different relationships with tradition.

Placed side by side, their ceramics reveal both distance and connection. Kazu’s practice is restless, expansive and deeply engaged with the energy of Momoyama ceramics; Hiroshi’s is equally serious but often more searching and inward, grounded in sustained investigation of clay, firing and historical form. Their works do not collapse into similarity. Instead, the exhibition asks what can be learned from the spaces between them.

Opens online Friday 30 October at 7pm GMT.
In gallery Saturday 31 October at 2pm, with Hiroshi Yamada in attendance.