A Kintsugi Master
A Kintsugi Master
I thank Lewis, my cat. One day, he broke a bowl and plate that were treasured mementos of my travels in Japan, making me vow to put the shards together again with kintsugi in Japan.
Authentic kintsugi mends cracked or broken ceramics with techniques used in maki-e, a traditional Japanese craft for decorating objects. Maki-e translates as ‘sprinkled pictures’ and involves coating objects with layers of lacquer made with sap from the urushi (lacquer) tree to form a glossy surface that’s embedded with other materials to make a ‘picture’. Whatever is used – shell fragments or powdered gold, for example – must all be delicately placed while the top layer of urushi is still fresh.
So, authentic kintsugi uses layers of urushi, decoratively topped with a fine layer of gold – kintsugi literally means ‘gold joinery’. And when each layer takes days to set hard before the next can be added, a work of kintsugi can take weeks or months to complete.
Keeping my vow would have to wait, I realised, in planning a recent brief trip to Japan. Instead, I booked a half-day course with the kintsugi master Showzi Tsukamoto (塚本尚司) at his Tokyo studio. This offered hands-on experience using authentic techniques, from which I’d take home a work of kintsugi.
Perfect, I thought, not realising how much more I’d gain from the course, due to who Showzi Tsukamoto is.
Showzi sensei studied at bachelor and master levels at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (now the Tokyo University of the Arts) in the late 1960s and early 1970s, focusing on metalwork, lacquer work and maki-e.
As a kintaishitsugei sculptor, Showzi has created metallic forms coated with urushi. His large artworks include the grand scale abstract sculptures in the Sunshine 60 building in Ikebukuro, Tokyo, installed in 1997. His small-size works have mostly been jewellery, predominantly rings – bold sculptural combinations of precious metal and urushi in black, red, green or blue, often with pearl, nacre (mother of pearl) or precious stones as features.
In the 1980s Showzi developed a method to do kintaishitsugei (bonding urushi to metal) with titanium, then just starting to be used in the decorative arts. He received a ‘Science for Art’ award for this remarkable innovation in 1989 from LVMH.
And he sets aside time for two linked passions – kintsugi and chanoyu, the traditional tea ceremony.
In the early 1970s, Showzi began to study chanoyu, Enshu-ryu – meaning in the style of the samurai tea master Kobori Enshu (1579-1647). This led him to visit the Hatakeyama Memorial Museum in Tokyo, established by Issey Hatakeyama (1881-1971), the leading industrialist who founded the Ebara Corporation.
Hatakeyama was fascinated by the history of the tea ceremony and the museum’s collection includes the work of kintsugi that Showzi saw on his first visit there in 1972 – a small red, rounded Akaraku-style tea bowl made in the seventeenth-century (Edo-period) by Hon'ami Kōetsu (1558-1637), a famous artist in the samurai culture of his time. This bowl has deep cracks, mended with urushi and gold. “It had a big influence on me, inspiring me to start kintsugi,” says Showzi.
He studied this tea bowl closely and began experimenting in his studio, teaching himself kintsugi. “I thought of Kōetsu as my teacher,’ says Showzi. “At art school, they will teach you maki-e, but they will not teach kintsugi. It’s not recognised as an art practice.”
Another profoundly influential museum visit occurred when Showzi was a boy in the Shiga prefecture. He had a ’wow’ moment when first seeing a nineteenth-century (Edo-period) suit of samurai armour at the Hikone Castle Museum, made of red-lacquered iron plates laced with red silk. “Since I saw this armour as a young boy, it has stayed in my mind,” says Showzi. While he doesn’t recall this suit made using kintaishitsugei having consciously informed his university subject choices, he credits that moment as when all his creative paths with urushi began.
Our kintsugi
At Showzi’s studio, we’re welcomed to a large worktable, by a wide window looking out onto suburban Tokyo. Showzi sits with us, as does Natsuyo Tsukamoto, Showzi’s wife, and Toshiko Miki – one of Showzi’s experienced kintsugi students who’s present as an English-language interpreter and teaching assistant.
The materials set neatly before each of us include a small porcelain soba cup made by Showzi’s daughter, a ceramicist. These identical cups are each made with a triangular ‘chip’ on the top edge. Showzi demonstrates, advises, encourages, and adds some of his master touches to help us use kintsugi to infill this chip.
We start by combining flour glue and urushi tree sap – a translucent brown-black-coloured liquid – to create a glue called kokuso-nori, before mixing in kaolin (clay) powder. Once we gain a gum-like consistency with this mix, we apply it over the ‘chip’ and place the cups into a wooden cabinet with controlled temperature (25°C) and humidity (75%). Inside, the urushi will set hard over three days in an oxidisation reaction that draws water vapour from the surrounding moist air.
Next comes a series of similar stages which all start with a different cup, for Showzi’s ingenious course arrangement is like a kintsugi relay. For example, the cup that starts my third stage already has two layers of urushi, added by two of Showzi’s prior students on two different earlier days. It will become the fourth stage cup for a future student.
With each new cup, we abrade the urushi that infills the chip space, for its surface to become evenly ‘flat’ with the curving porcelain. Then we add a layer of opaque liquid black urushi (urushi tree sap mixed with powdered iron) with a fine brush, before placing the cup inside the cabinet.
Every time we receive a new cup, the urushi looks increasingly glossy and abrading feels easier. So, as we progress to the later stages, we use increasingly finer-grade tools – from a metal file to a small tapered ceramic whetstone, to a small water-dampened block of charcoal (sumi) made from magnolia wood that makes a quiet, mesmerising sound when rubbed against the urushi. This sumitogi process needs to make the urushi surface utterly smooth.
The last urushi is opaque and richly rust-red (mixed using bengala pigment which contains iron oxide) as having red directly under the gold will lift the gold’s brilliance. We apply it with extreme care, with a very thin ‘maki-e brush’, for this layer isn’t filed back.
While these cups go in the cabinet for twenty minutes, we practice how we’ll add 24-carat gold powder from Kanazawa – a city renowned for gold production.
Once we’re ready, Showzi spoons the gold powder into a bamboo tube with a metal mesh inside. Holding the gold-loaded tube vertically in one hand, above ‘our’ soba cup in the other, we use gentle flicks of a finger to barely nudge the tube, creating a cascade of brilliant gold.
The triangle of fresh red urushi eventually disappears, buried under gold. Then, we set down the tube and gently finesse our work with a feather-light silk-cotton puff that is itself a work of golden beauty.
Talking over tea
With the cups inside the cabinet one last time, we move to a large square table for a simple tea ceremony, Enshu ryu. Showzi makes tea for each of us in turn, beating light-style matcha (powdered) green tea from Uji to a froth with a bamboo whisk and serving it in a tea bowl, chawan, alongside a traditional Japanese sweet. I enjoy the tastes and watching the unhurried precision and elegance of Showzi’s long-practiced movements. He gained his Enshu-ryu tea master licence in 1986.
In a wide-ranging conversation, Showzi shares fascinating insights into kintsugi’s history and philosophy, and how it is entwined with the tea ceremony and Japan’s samurai culture, from which kintsugi had emerged by the sixteenth century. The right to perform the tea ceremony was restricted then, according to degrees of favour with the powerful ruling samurai. Tea bowls, especially when bestowed as marks of allegiance to the ruling samurai, were precious and meaningful. “They were important to show wealth and power,” says Showzi. “So, if a tea bowl cracked, it was appropriate to mend it with material as expensive as gold.”
And, as tea is served, we learn the basics of what to do as ceremony guests, and that it’s usual for the master to brag politely about their tea bowls.
I feel enormously privileged to drink from a tea bowl that was once several Shino-type tea bowls, a type made only during the late sixteenth to early seventeenth century (Edo period). And yes, that was ‘bowls’ – it is a yobitsugi, meaning a ‘calling or gathering together’ of shards from multiple ceramic works. Several decades ago, Showzi met someone who had shards that were collected from a kiln that had fired Shino-type ceramics. He made two bowls from these shards in 2019, each time carefully selecting a set that would fit together well, and filing back the edges of some shards so that they’d do so neatly. He finished them tomonaoshi style – no joins are visible inside the bowl.
The other bowl of this pair is in the collection of the Musée Royal de Mariemont in Belgium. This museum acquired it after the bowl was displayed at Showzi’s solo exhibition at the L'Arbre à Plumes art gallery in Belgium in 2019.
Works of kintsugi have names, and Showzi named ‘my’ bowl Ume-ni-Uguisu – plum tree and Japanese nightingale. Showzi explains, “It presents springtime in Japan. The plum tree blooms in the pink glaze of the ceramic. Then the lines of gold are the tree branches, and the nightingale bird appears in vivid green colour with the tea.” This tea bowl is only fully true to its name when it fulfils its purpose, filled with tea.
Kintsugi is rich with beauty and philosophy.
Showzi mentions that tea bowls deteriorate with use over time, and one appreciates their changed appearance through the Japanese aesthetic philosophy of wabi-sabi, which Showzi explains as, “wabi respects imperfection, while sabi honours the natural lifecycle or aging of an object”. He emphasises that wabi-sabi emerged from the culture of chanoyu and is inherent to kintsugi. Its central idea is to proudly show past damage, rather than to hide it or discard damaged objects.
“Kintsugi is a passion for me, not a profession,” says Showzi. He set up kintsugi courses (under the name Kintsugisouke) because he enjoys introducing authentic kintsugi techniques to others. He began to run courses in Japanese in 1994, and in English in 2017.
Back at home, ‘my’ simple and imperfect yet perfect work of kintsugi rests on a high shelf. The sight of its golden triangle is a brilliant reminder of all I’ve gained by experiencing kintsugi with Showzi sensei, someone who is a master of this craft.
I see it across the room as I write and so does my feline friend, Lewis.