A sudden gesture and it’s the drama. Within seconds, your beloved porcelain vase falls to the floor, shattered into pieces. You can then either say goodbye to it and throw it in the trash or try to fix it vulgarly with glue. But another solution straight from Japan is also available to you. It is called the Kintsugi, which in Japanese means “golden joint”.
Dating back to the 16th century, this increasingly popular ancestral technique consists of repairing ceramic or porcelain objects with lacquer while accentuating cracks or chips with gold or silver. “We don’t hide the imperfections, on the contrary we come to highlight them to embellish the object”, underlines Ai Shimizu.
A lacquer, called urushi, to put the pieces back together
Master of the discipline, the artist, originally from Kyoto, was in Rennes this weekend at the invitation of the Brittany-Japan association to introduce the curious to the practice of Kintsugi. Six apprentices were at the rendezvous this Sunday morning at the international house of Rennes to discover this delicate repair method which requires a lot of time, patience and precision. “It takes several weeks, even several months to repair an object,” says Japanese teacher Tchié Sato, both student and translator during the workshop.
This art of resilience actually consists of a ritual in several stages. You must first repair the broken pieces by sticking them with a mixture of urushi, a sap from the Japanese lacquer tree, and flour. The object must then be allowed to dry for several days before polishing its surface with sheet glass and applying a new coat of lacquer.
“Accept the imperfections of an object”
Then comes a new phase of drying, which corresponds to the process of healing in the Kintsugi philosophy, before the final stage which consists in sprinkling the scar with gold or silver powder to sublimate them. “I really like this idea of bringing a broken object back to life by giving it another shape and a unique aspect while retaining its practicality,” says Elise. A member of the Brittany-Japan association, she plans to use this technique in the coming weeks to repair tea bowls recently broken by volunteers.
True artistic discipline, the Kintsugi also reveals an art of living which invites us to take care of the objects by repairing them rather than throwing them “There is also this idea of accepting the imperfections which give beauty to an object “says Jonathan, who intends to attack a Japanese mug broken into pieces. “I could have fixed it with glue, but it’s not very funny,” he smiles. And even the glue is not eternal. »