UNBROKEN closing week: why broken ceramics speak

Museums usually work hard to make ceramics appear whole. Bouke de Vries begins with fragments. In UNBROKEN at Princessehof, damage is not hidden but asked to carry memory. A vessel connected to the Han period is visibly reconstructed with kintsugi: time and culture are not restored to an imagined original state but remain together on the surface. This is more than the comforting idea that broken pottery can still be beautiful. De Vries worked as a ceramics conservator and encountered objects whose commercial value disappeared with a crack. He gives those rejected fragments another narrative. Memory Vessels place shards inside clear outlines; during the pandemic, viewers responded so strongly that some tattooed the forms on their bodies. The artist then returned those tattoo designs to a new series, allowing artwork, body and memory to exchange places.

The exhibition ends with the eleven-metre War and Pieces. Based on aristocratic table decorations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it raises a nuclear mushroom cloud from white porcelain fragments. Angels, skulls, Guan Yin and plastic “modern invaders” share the battlefield. Repair is not offered as a gentle ending: war, power and consumption remain visible after reassembly.

• Closing date: UNBROKEN remains at Princessehof in Leeuwarden through 16 August; check official opening and ticket information for the final week.
• Look from far and near: choose one apparently complete object, then approach it and find the cracks, gold and deliberate mismatch.
• Do not seek only attractive repair: compare Early Chinese, Memory Vessels and War and Pieces across historical, personal and political scales.
• Leave quiet time: an eleven-metre installation rewards a slow final section rather than a hurried checklist before closing.

Practical takeaway: the exhibition’s strongest question is not how to fix what broke, but who is allowed to define “whole”. The cracks remain, and the object gains a form of time it did not previously carry.

Sources: Official Princessehof exhibition and artwork information. Last checked 9 August 2026.