Hard Bodies: Contemporary Japanese Lacquer Sculpture

“Appreciation of lacquer is a taste which has to be acquired, but which, when acquired, grows upon one, and places the best lacquer in the category of almost sacred things.”

– Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese (1890)

“These sculptures are one-of-a-kind, the artists bold and brilliant, and it became our goal to assemble a compelling collection of these works and present them to the public, which has not been done before.”

– Dr. Andreas Marks, Curator

It’s a tradition nearly as old as civilization itself. Since the Neolithic era, artisans in East Asia have coated bowls, cups, boxes, baskets, and other utilitarian objects with a natural polymer distilled from the sap of the Rhus verniciflua, known as the lacquer tree. Lacquerware was—and still is—prized for its sheen: a lustrous beauty that artists learned to accentuate over the centuries with inlaid gold, silver, mother-of-pearl, and other precious materials.

However, since the late 1980s, this tradition has been challenged. A small but enterprising circle of lacquer artists have pushed the medium in entirely new and dynamic directions by creating large-scale sculptures, works that are both conceptually innovative and superbly exploitative of lacquer’s natural virtues.

To create these new forms and shapes, artists bend tradition to their needs. Creating lacquer art continues to challenge contemporary artists, who must master the medium’s demanding techniques and also choose whether to continue established traditions or pursue new forms of expression. In the latter category are a number of individuals who have successfully altered the age-old perception of lacquer by expanding boundaries and defying expectations. These 33 works by 16 artists constitute the first-ever comprehensive exhibition of contemporary Japanese lacquer sculpture, and range from the playful to the sublimely elegant to the fantastic. They have all been drawn from the Clark Collections at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the only collection in the world to feature this extraordinary new form.

Please contact TravelingExhibitions@ArtsandArtists.org for more information.

 

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