Beautiful Breaks
When something breaks, throw it away and buy a new one. Right? Gen Saratani aims to change that way of thinking one broken bowl at a time. This artist says that the idea that ceramics can be repaired is a shock to most people. Gen enjoys letting them know that “you don’t need to be sad when you have a chip or a break in a precious family treasure.” Not only can it be fixed, but it can be made more lovely with an ancient Japanese art called kintsugi. Gen’s family has practiced traditional Japanese lacquer art for three generations.
In kintsugi, chipped and cracked ceramics are repaired using the Japanese lacquer urushi. Urushi is the sap of a tree that grows in East Asia. The tree is a cousin of poison ivy. Its sticky sap acts like a natural glue that holds the pottery pieces together. Urushi makes the pottery shiny and strong. After it dries, real gold powder is put on the cracks to make them stand out, creating new bold designs that are truly one of a kind. The pottery is now so strong that Gen states it will stay together for thousands of years.
Although kintsugi has been practiced in Japan for over five hundred years, kintsugi has recently been growing in popularity around the world. Gen believes this is part of the movement to use materials that come from nature and to recycle and reuse.
Gen has never found any pottery that is too broken to be put back together again. However, the more tiny pieces there are, the trickier and more costly the repair will be. Major repairs can cost thousands of dollars, take months to complete, and require all the skills of a highly trained urushi master — and there aren’t too many masters still practicing.
To become a respected urushi master, one must study under a urushi master for twelve years. Gen began his study as a child helping out in his father’s art studio. His father learned from his father. Gen advises that a urushi master must be “patient and focused” because this art involves “always working alone with small pieces for a long time.”
Know what else takes patience? Waiting for a bowl to break on its own. Once pottery has been repaired with kintsugi, it is more detailed and more valuable than it was before. A boring old plain-white bowl can be transformed into a unique work of art coated with real gold. Some eager art lovers don’t like waiting around for gravity to take its course. They decide to take matters into their own hands.
Don’t think the conveniently clumsy can fool a urushi master. Gen can always tell the difference between ceramics that have been damaged by accident and those that have been smashed on purpose. Gen says that “it is hard to break in a nice shape.” When pottery is thrown to the ground or hammered, it usually ends up with “an ugly scar or crack.”
Gen finds it very strange that people come to his art studio to pay him to fix something that they just broke on purpose, but it actually happens quite often. Urushi masters have been called on to fix fake breaks for centuries. Still, Gen refuses to ever crack ceramics on purpose. Why? The most beautiful breaks are the ones that happen purely by chance.