So the summer has gone and autumn has come. Maison & Objet which introduce world design and craft appears again in near Paris; Villpinte. We looked into Japanese craft there, of course.
This time, we met NAKABI, a printing company from Kanazawa which introduces Kutani ceramic painters. Kutani ceramic is a traditional ceramic production in Kanazawa, which origins in the late Edo period, 19C. Its characteristic is its drawing on the ceramic. The Kutani ceramic production has their ceramic painters.
As the ceramic production shrunk by the time, the ceramic pattern designers have less job to do. They are great artists themselves, so NAKABI started to promote their design as pretty paper items. Small message notes with four seasons flowers, masking tapes, colourful stationaries.
Another lovely encounter was a project from Nagoya, Creation as DIALOGUE.
DIALOGUE | Creation as DIALOGUE (creation-as-dialogue.jp)
They promote Japanese traditional crafts locates in Nagoya around.
Narumi shibori (tie-dye) textile, which I deal in our shop, was in the project. It is very sad, but it is true that many local traditional crafts are dying. And once lost the technologies, they will never come back. Even though the project isn’t perfect solution for saving local historical crafts, it is important that a government make effort to support their evolution.
