Sha Sha Higby's pieces at the Resonant Uruwashi Exhibit in Fukushima,Japan
This exhibiti is on view at Kitakata City Museum of Art ,Fukushima,Japan until November 24,2012.Sakurako Matsushima is speaking in this video.Sha Sha Higby's work is featured in the first part,as well as artists from 5 continents. We hope to bring this exhibit to other parts of the world. Please contact shasha at shashahigby.com for more info.
Japan's Urushi Art and its Current State
Sakurako MATSUSHIMA, Fumie SASAI
Urushi is closely associated with Japanese life. Urushi crafts include bowls, chopsticks, boxes, trays, tables, and furniture. The material has also been widely used to paintand décorate temples. Many Japanese people consider urushi an important symbol of Japanese culture and heritage.
Urushi is the sap collected by cutting grooves in the trunk of urushi trees allowing the sap to seep out. The sap's major component urushiol reacts with oxygen and hardens with the help of an enzyme called laccase. In Japan, the tree is grown and its sap collected in Iwate prefecture in the northeast and Ibaraki prefecture in greater Tokyo area.
Japanese traditional urushi techniques include decoration techniques such as maki-e (sprinkled metal powder), raden (mother of pearl inlay), chinkin (engraving with metal leaf or powder), urushi-e (drawing using colored urushi), kinma (colored engraving), haku-e (metal leaf drawing), shunkei-nuri (coating using highly translucent urushi), and kawari-nuri (decoration using various materials and colored urushi). In these techniques, the base object or substrate is usually wood. But kanshitsu, molding by coating layered cloth with urushi, is used for objects like Buddhist statues. Urushi is useful in a sense that it can be applied to wood, cloth, clay, paper, bamboo, leather, metal, and glass. Urushi wares differ from region to region, from Aomori in the north to Okinawa in the south.
Contemporary urushi art has two aspects, industrial crafts based on traditional techniques and art-oriented works by artists using traditional techniques.
Industrial urushi crafts developed under the system of role division among craftsmen each specializing in woodwork, base treatment, painting, and decoration. Regional brands such as Kyo-nuri, Aizu-nuri, and Wajima-nuri were established based on the areal features of base treatment, painting, and decoration. Out of the many traditional techniques, maki-e in particular was uniquely developed in Japan. Patterns would be drawn with the sap, and before it dried, gold, silver, or tin would be sprinkled to make the pattern stand out. This technique characterizes Japanese urushi art.
Skills developed and perfected by devoting oneself to them everyday became traditions as they were handed down from generation to generation. As a result, in each generation masters with several decades of experience would emerge. Highly sophisticated artworks with unique regional characters were created. Exquisitely decorated, breathtakingly beautiful masterpieces.
In contrast to the rigid handing down of traditional designs and methods, contemporary artists, while using the same techniques, focus on the innovative and creative aspects of art. By using new shapes and materials, they pursue new flexible forms of expression. Many contemporary urushi artists create their works from the initial step of choosing the materials or molding all the way through to the finished product.
By doing this, artistic ideas can be directly reflected in each step of the process. This creative method has been greatly influenced by modern urushi crafts education.