My name is Carla Stansifer, I'm the curator of Japanese art at the Morikami Museum and
Japanese Gardens.
Today, we'll be talking about Hard Bodies: Contemporary Japanese Lacquer Sculpture.
This exhibit is actually on loan from the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and we feature
16 contemporary artists.
We have at least one piece from each of the artists in the show, and they have a wide
variety, as you can see, of textures, styles, and techniques that they use.
Lacquer is an extremely versatile material.
You can do so much with it in the right hands of someone who's skilled and understands the
material.
I think the most important thing I want people to know is that these artists, they come from
a very long lineage, a very long tradition, and all of the artists are very aware of that,
they honor that tradition, but yet, they're doing completely new and innovative things.
Each of the pieces, they're coated with lacquer, and I should say that lacquer can coat just
about anything.
Paper, bone, wood, metal, shark skin, it can be coated on anything, and it will protect
that substance, but it has to go through a curing process.
It's not a drying process, where you'd be removing humidity.
They actually put into a container where you add heat and you add moisture, and then it
cures, the catalyst, the chemistry takes over, and it creates this wonderfully hardened surface
that protects it from heat, electromagnetic rays, bacteria, all kinds of things.
This is a really fun piece.
This is a piece by the artist Someya Satoshi.
He's one of the younger artists in the show, and he had a smaller version of this bull,
and the collector, Willard Clark, saw it, and as it happens, Mr. Clark was a cattleman
by trade, and so, he saw the small bull, he fell in love with it, and he said, can you
make another one for me, and make it bigger?
So, he did, and it's a really lively, fun piece.
It has a lot of pictural imagery, and I think a lot of visitors like to come and look at
this piece.
Everyone sees something a little bit different.
Love the variety.
He's, the artist is really blending imagery from East and West.
We have some things here, a good example is the moo that you see in English, and up above,
it says moh, which is what the cow says in Japanese, so again, right there, he's showing
that he's trying to reach out to the audience on both sides.
This piece is by an artist, Aoki Chie, and she's a really great provocative artist, she's
upandcoming, and in this piece, she's chosen to go back to the 8th century for some of
her inspiration.
During the Nara period in Japan, there was a long, wellestablished tradition of creating
portraits out of lacquer of famous monks and teachers of the Buddhist tradition.
And also, the decoration, you look at this moire pattern that she has, it looks very
modern and contemporary, but that also goes back to the 8th century.
I think a really good example of the environmental aspects of these pieces comes from the work
by Fujita Toshiaki, and what he does is, he creates these pieces by adding the unrefined
lacquer, he adds one layer a day for two years, so he essentially grows these pieces, much
like a mollusc or tree bark.
And it's interesting to me, when we look at lacquer as a material, lacquer was usurped
by the introduction of plastics, and now, with a lot of what's going on environmentally,
we need to steer away from plastics, we may be coming back to lacquer as a more utilitarian
product.
This piece is by Kurimoto Natsuki.
One of the things I love about this piece, it's called Dual Sun, and the use of shell
inlay, or raden, as it's called in Japanese, is highlighted here, and you can see the different
shades of shell as you go through the piece, and the different colors tell you where the
shell comes from.
This piece is called Undercurrents 2009II.
It's by an artist called Matsushima Sakurako, one of the female artists represented in the
show, and this piece, I love it.
She does a lot of wearable art.
She started off in metal, and as her pieces got larger, they were a little more unwieldy,
so she shifted to lacquer, which is really light, deceptively light.
If you were to pick these pieces up, you would see, you'd be surprised how light they are.
I also just love the beauty of these pieces.
They're so wonderful, they're so innovative, and yet, they're linked to the tradition,
thousands of years of tradition that the artists are very aware of and honoring, but they're
doing it in new and unique ways.