Contemporary craft applying chozetsu giko featured at Mitsui Memorial Museum

Craft artists of the Meiji era (1868-1912) are said to have used chozetsu giko (transcendental techniques) in their creation of ceramics, metalworks, wood carvings, cloisonne (shippo) ware, maki-e lacquerware and other types of handicraft. The incredible techniques, inexorably, declined with the Westernization of Japan. The artists of today, however, have developed their own skill set inspired and encouraged by what the pioneers of modern Japanese craft had achieved.

Special Exhibition
In the Genes, Taking Marvelous Meiji Craftsmanship into the Future

Sep 12 (Tue) – Nov 26 (Sun), 2023

Mitsui Memorial Museum
(Nihonbashi, Tokyo)

*See outline below for details

“In the Genes, Taking Marvelous Meiji Craftsmanship into the Future,” a special exhibition that kicked off at the Mitsui Memorial Museum in Tokyo’s Nihonbashi district on Sept. 12, 2023, is one presentation of what contemporary artists have accomplished thus far with their own “transcendental” skills.

The exhibition is showcasing a total of 64 works by 17 artists among the vanguard of contemporary Japanese craft art. Meiji-era works of artistic and historical value — a great number of which was collected by Masayuki Murata, the director of the Kiyomizu Sannenzaka Museum in Kyoto — will also go on display.

“Transcendental techniques” in today’s craft can be found, for instance, in Fukuda Toru’s amazing woodwork “Puddling” (2022). The lifelike butterflies sipping moisture from the puddles were made not by carving out the figures, but by fittimg small pieces of wood. The puddles were created by chiseling away at the platform and then burnishing the bumps.

Works by Meiji-era craft artists: