Portland Magazine
November 24, 2021
Artist and author Makoto Fujimura visited University of Portland (via Zoom, from his studio in Princeton, NJ) in early September to give the Zahm lecture, an annual talk on faith and reason. Days later, on September 11, 2021, Fujimura relaunched the Kintsugi Academy, which he co-founded as a way to commemorate the 20th anniversary of 9/11, an event that gave his work new focus. What follows is an excerpt of Fujimura’s remarks.
By Makoto Fujimura
THIS IS KINTSUGI, teaware that was mended in the 20th century. As you can see, gold is creating a design. Kintsugi masters use Japan lacquer. It’s a fairly secretive tradition because the lacquer is notoriously difficult to handle and it’s highly poisonous and toxic. It’s like poison ivy except it’s five times stronger. Only a few masters exist, and they mend these bowls using the lacquer so they can be reused. Instead of gluing the bowl back together as if nothing has happened, Japan lacquer masters mend it but use the fractures to create these designs and so it is literally new creation. The Japan lacquer becomes the river of gold that runs through the cracks. The resulting bowl, the Kintsugi bowl, is far more valuable than the original, even though the original may be of renowned ceramic value.
In consumer culture, the broken vessel is some-thing to be thrown away, buy a new one, or you fix it so it looks brand new again. In Japanese culture, something that is broken is an entry point into beholding that fragment as beautiful, something that is valuable.
To me, that signifies something, that this is part of God’s way of showing us how we might go through brokenness and trauma and be brought into new creation. We recall Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances. It is astonishing to me that he would come back as a human at all. After all the suffering that he’d been through, he could’ve chosen to be anything, but he chose to be human. And his post-resurrection appearance, not only is he resurrected humanity, but it is also a wounded reality. Jesus’ wounds are still with him, and that’s a profound reality of the new creation. Rather than staying with perfected reality beyond the grave, beyond suffering, Jesus wanted to remind us that it is through his wounds that we are healed. It is as if he is communicating to us, signaling to us, that our wounds, our traumas, our brokenness are but an entry point into greater promise that Jesus brings on post-resurrection day. And so we live on this side of the resurrection, and we can look at a Kintsugi bowl and remind ourselves that this is part of our journey, our journey home, our journey of new discovery, our journey that allows us to see beyond our own Ground Zero experiences. Even literally standing on top of the ashes, we can see God’s work in front of us.
Charis-Kairos (The Tears of Christ), Copyright © 2011 Makoto Fujimura
MY PAINTINGS ARE considered to be in the contemporary art vein and yet they also use traditional Japanese materials, going back to 8th-century Japan and refined in 15th/16th-century Japan especially.
I was very fortunate to receive a national scholarship and to go back to Japan and spend six-and-a-half years there mastering the craft of Nihonga, a Japanese style of painting, and that’s what you see here. These are the materials for Nihonga. Pulverized minerals mixed with natural hide glue. It’s all water based. The work can be monumental. There are layers and layers. Sometimes there are over 60 to 100 layers as preparation before I start. I call what I do slow art. I try to slow things down to resist the quickening of time.
Part of this slow process for me is prayer. It is a way for me to understand my role as a human being creating beauty in a broken world. I have to have the pigments be pulverized, the minerals be pulverized. Once when I was speaking in New York City at one of my galleries, a friend said to me that process of pulverization, of creating something new, is exactly what God does with us. I thought that was profound. I did not realize in the ’90s that I would be directly impacted by 9/11. I lived three blocks away. My children became, that day, Ground Zero children. And the trauma of that day still continues to this day, but I kept on working with these materials, which became a metaphor of my life. God is pulverizing me, and God is also creating something too.
THIS IS WALKING ON WATER—GLACIER, a 12-foot painting that has been featured in the “Re-Membrance” exhibit, commemorating the 9/11 terrorist attacks; the 3/11/2011 Great Tohoku earthquake, tsunami, and ongoing nuclear meltdown; and the Columbine High School massacre in 1999.
Close up, you can see the sand-like pulverized minerals. They’re literally prisms, so when you look at the surface of my paintings, if you stay with it 15 to 20 minutes, you start to see a hue of refracted light that comes off of the prismatic pigments. They have this rainbow hue. Your mind shuts down for you to begin to see that light. Slow art.
This painting is from a series of paintings, mostly abstract works, large paintings that deal with pulverized azurite and malachite, and they are poured over the canvas. I literally walk on top of the paintings. And then that becomes part of the metaphor of thinking about the response to trauma, in this case the 3/11/2011 disaster in Japan, the tsunami, and the ongoing nuclear melt-down. How do I as an artist respond?
MAKOTO FUJIMURA’S most recent book, Art and Faith: A Theology of Making, was published by Yale University Press this year.
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