In a quiet neighborhood of Kanazawa, behind a heavy wooden door flanked by rows of filtered glass, a tea ceremony is underway. The smells of cedar, tatami, straw and matcha blend together and curl into the nostrils of the rapt audience. For all its pleasing sensuality, this is not a classic ochakai gathering. For one, the tea master is spooning matcha out of a large can marked Nissan motor oil; for another, the tea house is built like a bucket.
“I always wanted to go inside a kioke,” says Shuji Nakagawa at art and craft event Go for Kogei, referring to the traditional wooden buckets of which he is a master craftsman. “But I couldn’t make people smaller, so I thought, ‘I’ll have to make this bucket bigger.’”
Nakagawa is not a bucket upstart. The 57-year-old Kyoto native is a third-generation mokkōgei (woodworking) craftsman; since childhood, his father’s workshop was his playground, and wood scraps were his toys. At Go for Kogei, an annual festival in Japan’s Hokuriku region that opened on Sept. 13, he unveils his latest imaginings: woodcrafts-based architecture.
The Kanazawa structure in Ishikawa Prefecture is Nakagawa’s third iteration of his teahouse in a year and a half, this one with a thatched roof built by Kobe-based artisan Ikuya Sagara. At 3 meters across and 2 meters tall, it’s constructed using the same technique as the traditional bucket once used in daily life, for bathing or as containers for rice or sushi, among other uses. Where a typical bucket might use 15 staves, the tea house uses some 80.
The technique has been around for centuries. Individual wooden staves are held together by a metal band. Tighten the band, and the wood pieces stay in place; knock it loose, and the structure falls apart. Because wood expands when it’s wet, the very act of filling the bucket with water is what prevents leaks. In theory, it doesn’t need anything else, though the staves might be reinforced by bamboo nails or glue. The idiom “taga ga hazureru,” meaning to let down one’s guard or “become unhinged,” as one colleague put it, is thought to come from the loosening of the band around an oke bucket.
From childhood, Nakagawa felt pressure from his father and grandfather to pursue the family metier. (His younger brother went into interior design.) “Whenever I said yes, they’d be so happy, so I just kept saying yes, yes.” But like the grain inside a piece of wood, some things simply cannot be bent to one’s will.
At Kyoto Seika University, Nakagawa studied contemporary art and made large steel sculptures. Once he graduated, despite his father’s urging, Nakagawa tried to walk both paths: Throughout his 20s, he made buckets as part of the family business during the week and worked on his sculptures on the weekend. In 2003, he opened his own woodworking workshop in a remote town on the west side of Lake Biwa in Shiga Prefecture (“Here no one gets mad at me for sawing deep into the night,” he says) and realized he had to let go of art. It simply wasn’t enough to make a living.
That traditional woodworking was a more prudent economic choice may come as a surprise. Nakagawa’s grandfather had been able to make a living as a woodworker, but industrial and plastic goods have since driven out handmade wooden ones. His father, Kiyotsugu Nakagawa, left behind the oke technique and developed new designs, for which he was designated a National Living Treasure in 2001 for bijutsu kōgei (artistic crafts).
Nakagawa is determined to see what else he can imagine based on the ol’ bucket. “This craft has existed for about 700 years, but there was a real possibility that it could come to an end with my generation,” he says. “I have a mission, if not to innovate, then to transform traditional woodworking methods with new designs.”
In his Shiga Prefecture workshop, the sturdy, heavy-set man with a trim beard sits among 300 hand planers and rooms full of timber. With a cap pulled down over his eyes, Nakagawa dresses simply, often appearing in plain khaki-colored pants and a navy blue shirt, seeming ready at any time in any place to shave a piece of wood. But his woodworker look belies an articulate erudition.
Nakagawa works most days. He employs a staff of seven woodworkers, who do the vast majority of their work by hand, with the occasional help of chain saws and band saws. He either designs on the computer and shapes the wood to fit his idea, or just as often, he lets the wood tell him what to do. “I adopt both the human-controlled approach and the definitely-cannot-be-controlled approach,” he says.
These two processes can be seen on the shelves of his workshop. A champagne cooler designed for Dom Perignon is so smooth it almost seems impossible it was made by a human hand. But tucked among the pretty, photogenic objects that would make Nakagawa a finalist for the inaugural Loewe Craft Prize in 2017, are wilder works. One looks like it’s been hacked directly from a tree and like it would give you a palm full of splinters. Wiggle the lid free, and nestled inside is a bottle of sake.
Twenty-five years ago, Nakagawa says, there was a clear hierarchy in the Western art world: At the top was contemporary art, below it design, and all the way at the bottom, he motions with his hand, craft. But beginning in the 2010s, that vertical structure began to shift to horizontal. He’s astonished that the works shown in New York galleries have not been his abstract steel sculptures but his wooden buckets, and that such a locally focused craft could gain him global attention.
As an event, Go for Kogei interrogates the distinction between craft and contemporary art and questions the need for such strictly defined categories. But for Nakagawa, the two are quite different — and ought to be.
“A painter says, ‘This is my expression,’ and the viewer either likes it or doesn’t,” he says. “But a craftwork exists through the relationship between the maker and the user — both are necessary.”
There’s also the relationship between maker and material to consider, he says. In that sense, the value lies not in the finished object itself, nor the vision of one person, but in the ongoing development of the technique — in his case, across generations.
“In contemporary art, the subject is ‘I’ — as in the ego, ‘I am.’ But in craft, there is no subject,” he says. “I’m a third-generation craftsman. But if I said, ‘I’m a second-generation Picasso,’ that would basically mean I’m a fake, right?”
None of Nakagawa’s three kids, the oldest of whom is in college, are especially likely to become the fourth Nakagawa mokkōgei craftsman. But that does not seem to bother him; he hopes to reach younger generations and expand the technique to other fields, such as architecture, to help the craft survive another 100 or 200 years. And to his surprise, it’s working.
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