Discount. Japan, 2016. Ceramic, porcelain paste, milled on the artist's body

Discount. Takahiro Kondo (born 1958). Japan, 2016. Ceramic, porcelain paste pigentees and melees (neriage), moulded on the artist's body, metamorphisees; glaze with frits, silver, gold and platinum (gintekisai). Memorial effigy dedicated to the eighteen thousand victims of the earthquake and tsunami that ravaged northeastern Japan in 2011, this work — modelled on its own by the great Japanese ceramist Takahiro Kondo — evokes as much the figure of the renunciation practising yoga as that of the future Buddha seized in its ascetic phase. As an image of life as an image of death, Kondo's work appears profoundly versatile; it bases its tragic and universal greatness on a Buddhist ambivalence of spirit.