The world’s First Exhibition of Exclusively Wooden Buckets

　Nakagawa's works exhibited in the "Visionaries: Making Another Perspective" at KyotoCity KYOCERA Museum of Art

These distinctive wood buckets created by Nakagawa Shuji are exhibited in the Kyoto city art museum as a contemporary art piece.

Nakagawa Shuji is one of the most prominent artisans who turn handicrafts into modern design or art pieces. He collaborates with cutting-edge designers, and his works are housed and used in the Victoria Albert Museum, world-famous prestigious restaurants, including noma.

For SHITSURAI ten , he has organized a special exhibition for contemporary wood buckets made by his apprentices and other creators. As far as we know, this is the first-ever art exhibition of wood buckets made by living artisans.

wood buckets turned to cups

The wooden bucket was a standard vessel for daily life in pre-modern times worldwide. It is generally made of wood plates tied up using iron or bamboo threads to form a shape of a bucket. They have lost their presence in daily life due to plastic items being more common. In Kyoto, there were said to be more than two hundred wood bucket artisans at their peak. However, only two survived after the middle of the twenty century. One of those who has survived is the Nakagawa family. To challenge their survival, bucket artisans struggled to change the styles and functions of wooden buckets to tableware and craft arts. Shuji Nakagawa’s father created a wooden mosaic using a bucket joining method called "masaawase, "and he was designated as a Living National Treasure by this skill. Shuji Nakagawa is succeeding in his father’s innovative attitude and also encourages younger artisans to do more unconventional works.

One example is a floor lamp consisting of twisted timbers used for a bucket, and the other is a round-shaped stool using a bucket structure. An amateur artisan who learned bucket-making through YouTube has also joined.

Nakagawa also exhibited Chinese and Japanese antique buckets from his collection. He humbly says, “Thinking about how intricate skills those old buckets were created with, I can’t be satisfied with my current work.”

Traditional wood buckets are now seeing a revival as a hybrid of handicraft and modern design, and a wood buckets vessel is returning for making n authentic way of fermenting food.

The exhibition is an annual show of a combination between craft and photography.
Tomas Svab, the curator this time, says "buckets and photographs have a similar function. They contain something essential and work as a border to keep contents."

SHITSURAI -Offerings Ⅸ- The Shore of Two Infinities-
TERMINAL KYOTO
 until May 14th, 2023