Inspiration – Japanese Traditional Craft Exhibition

A couple weeks back we took a visit to the 69th Japanese Traditional Craft Exhibition, and I thought I share some inspirational highlights from the show. The show encompassed several different areas; metalwork, ceramics, kimono, glassware, lacquerware, bamboo weaving, woodwork, and traditional dolls. I didn’t take pictures of every field, as I was mostly drawn to the ceramics, bamboo, and woodwork, but essentially everything on display was stunning. It feels rare to see craft of this level nowadays. With most of these pieces, you could tell that the work involved months and months of effort. I find that level of devotion and patience mind blowing, and I desperately wanted to be able to pick things up and inspect them closer.

It’s incredible to see the culmination of skill and knowledge that goes into making objects like these. And it’s incredible that people are still doing this work. I always end up finding inspiration in the actual aesthetics and forms of the pieces themselves, but also seeing this level of work makes me want to do better in my own work.

Rather than write in detail on the individual pieces, I thought I’d mostly just present the images below, but feel free to comment if you have any questions/thoughts/ideas related to any of the work pictured.

I hope you enjoy the highlights.

Ceramics

First up are a selection of ceramic pieces. One thing that blew me away was the scale of some of these vessels and bowls. They are massive!

Bamboo Weaving

Form and pattern are the things that I’m personally drawn to with Japanese bamboo work. Kumiko, as a craft, has really taken off amongst woodworkers over the past few years in the West, and in terms of pattern I think there’s a lot shared with bamboo work. But there’s a whole other level of pattern and layering possible with bamboo weaving, particularly when it comes to creating patterns on curved surfaces.

Woodwork

Last but not least, the woodwork part of the show. Something that surprised me with these pieces (mostly boxes) was the heavy use of inlay and marquetry. That is an aspect of traditional woodwork here in Japan that has eluded me up to this point. I’ve rarely seen this level of inlay work outside of handmade instruments like guitars, etc. Anyone who has any experience or knowledge of instrument making is aware of the difficulty of doing inlay and stringing in soft wood, which many of these pieces were. (Many of the pieces used jindai sugi, which is incredibly expensive and rare Japanese red cedar that has been unearthed after being buried for a long period of time, taking on a brownish/gray color.)