Interviews, Issue 9

Edmund de Waal

The Language of Fragments

Words YUKO HASEGAWA

Photography HARRY CROWDER

What we choose to keep, and how we choose to place it, shapes what we understand. In this conversation, curator Yuko Hasegawa and British artist Edmund de Waal discuss porcelain as a carrier of memory, loss, and movement, reflecting on how objects structure our thoughts. His work as a potter, writer, and artist forms a continuous field in de Waal’s practice, through which he reflects on the fragment, the politics of display, and the necessity of slow looking. Beauty, in his work, is inseparable from ethics, and form becomes a way of thinking through history.

YUKO HASEGAWA: You’re not only a remarkable artist, but also a writer, and I’ve been rereading your beautiful reflections on porcelain. There’s such a deep sensitivity for craftsmanship in your writing. I also know you’ve had a long relationship with Japan, which connects to both of our backgrounds. Could you tell me about your first experience encountering Japan — what it meant for you, what you remember?

EDMUND DE WAAL: I first traveled to Japan when I was 17. At the time, I was already training in ceramics in Britain — I’d been working with clay from a very young age. That first trip was incredibly significant. I went to study both ceramics and the tea ceremony, and it really confirmed many of the interests I already had.

My relationship with Japan deepened further in my 20s, when I returned to study the language and began making porcelain. I traveled extensively throughout the country and eventually wrote a book about Bernard Leach and his time in Japan. So yes, it’s been a long-standing connection — going back and forth, learning, and thinking deeply about Japanese aesthetics and architecture.

YH: You mentioned architecture, which is fascinating — especially the idea of Japanese architecture as a kind of modernism, even dating back to the 11th century with tea houses and sukiya style.

EdW: Yes, my earliest experiences were shaped by the aesthetics of the tea ceremony and early Japanese architecture. Those forms of beauty — the quietude, the precision, the intentionality — had a profound influence on my sensibility.

There’s this idea of “slow looking,” of contemplating objects carefully, handling them with attention. That’s something I carry with me still. I was also deeply drawn to concepts like wabi-sabi — the embrace of imperfection, transience, and restraint.

But interestingly, my own porcelain practice developed outside of Japan. It wasn’t influenced by Japanese porcelain per se, but rather by years of work elsewhere, forming my own language through decades of making.

YH: You’ve also traveled to China and other countries in Asia, and I’m curious: what did those experiences bring to your understanding or influence in your work?

EdW: As a writer and as an artist, I’m deeply interested in how ideas move across the world. Porcelain, for me, is not just a material — it’s an idea. It represents purity, whiteness, the seemingly impossible transformation of earth into something that can hold light. It’s both culturally and materially powerful. When I work in China, or write about porcelain — as I did in my book The White Road — I’m thinking about how it was reinvented in Europe, how it migrated, how it became something different depending on where it traveled. In my studio here in London, I’m often making porcelain pieces, but the space is also filled with fragments: shards from China, Japan, South Asia. They tell a story of how porcelain has moved, broken, and re-formed across cultures and centuries. They are my archive, my language.

YH: That’s fascinating, because I see in your work a kind of transformation — taking something so deeply rooted in tradition and remaking it in a contemporary artistic language. Each fragment you use has its own story, but you bring them together into something abstract, poetic.

EdW: Thank you, that means a lot. What compels me, and what continues to challenge me even after 45 years, is that porcelain is far too important to be left only to art historians or academics. It’s not just about facts or timelines, it’s about people. For over 1000 years, anonymous hands have touched this material, shaped it, and changed it. And we often don’t know who they were. But there’s a powerful connection between their hands and our minds when we encounter these fragments.

That connection, between movement, memory, and material, is what I return to again and again. For me, porcelain is a diasporic material. It has crossed borders, carried stories, and taken on new forms in each place. It embodies migration, displacement, and transformation. That’s the heart of my work.

YH: That idea of shifting meaning reminds me of Soetsu Yanagi. He valued the anonymous craftsman, quietness, and beauty in simplicity — qualities I see in your work as well. How do you relate to his philosophy?

EdW: Yes, Yanagi and the Mingei movement are deeply meaningful to me. Over 30 years ago, I wrote a book about Yanagi, Bernard Leach, and Shoji Hamada. I studied their writings, spent time at the Mingeikan in Tokyo, and developed a deep respect for the aesthetics they championed — this idea of finding beauty in everyday craftsmanship, often without names or signatures.

At the same time, my own work has developed in a very different direction. I’m drawn to ideas of consumption and display, especially around European porcelain: court wares, porcelain rooms, and the grand collections of the 18th century. That world couldn’t be more different from Yanagi’s philosophy.

But I still share a passion for the handmade, for the object that carries memory. I want to make works that honor that lineage — from Korean, Chinese, and Japanese potters — while also engaging with my own European heritage. I’m interested in how we display and interpret objects, and for me, that involves music, poetry, architecture — all these ways of shaping experience. So while my approach may diverge from Yanagi’s, I still carry his ideas with me.