Matrix Team
Kintsugi (golden joinery), also known as Kintsukuroi (golden repair), is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery.
Some four or five centuries ago in Japan, a lavish technique emerged for repairing broken ceramics. Artisans began using lacquer and gold pigment to put shattered vessels back together. This tradition is still going strong.
The kintsugi technique, it is believed, may have been invented around the fifteenth century, when Ashikaga Yoshimasa, the eighth shogun of the Ashikaga shogunate after breaking his favourite cup of tea sent it to China to get it repaired. He was disappointed to see when it came back stapled together. The metal pins were unsightly, so local craftsmen came up with a solution—they filled the crack with a golden lacquer, making the bowl more unique and valuable. This repair elevated the fallen bowl back to its place as shogun’s favorite and prompted a whole new art form.
The philosophy behind the technique is to recognize the history of the object and to visibly incorporate the repair into the new piece instead of disguising it.
Not only has kintsugi been adopted and adapted by leading contemporary artists, these days, one can take kintsugi lessons and find self-help and books that use it as a metaphor for embracing flaws and imperfections. In the beginning, however, kintsugi was just a practical—albeit beautiful—means of repair.
