Kintsugi

In Japanese culture, a damaged object can be more highly valued than if it were intact; its interest lies in the obvious scar that it exhibits. The art of repairing to embellish has a name : kintsugi (in literal terms “golden repair”) based on the Japanese philosophy of “no mind » whereby there is acceptance of change and fate . The first references to kintsugi date back to the XVth century, when the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa sent back a broken teabowl to China to be mended. According to the tradition, the bowl came back in one piece adorned with rough iron fastenings. The shogun vehemently protested and his Japanese artisans proposed to mask the repairs by affixing visible gold lacquer onto the cracks. These became new ornaments which beautified the original work of art. Since then, Shoguns did not revert to throwing way their broken pottery but rather offer them a second life, valuing its breakage as opposed to hiding it.

The art of kintsugi was from, then on, sought after by numerous collectors, notably the Chajin, who practiced the tea ceremony by deliberately breaking pottery solely to decorate it with golden inlays. By proposing a new life to the object, kintsugi mirrors human dramas, which mark an individual but from which he can emerge with more poignancy than those who are intact, having been sheltered from life’s vicissitudes.

Edmond Wells,
Encyclopédie du Savoir Relatif et Absolu, tome XII.