Kintsugi: Broken and Beautiful
Kintsugi “golden joinery”, also known as Kintsukuroi or “golden repair” is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the broken pieces with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, a method similar to the maki-e technique. The Kintsugi technique treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.
Japanese historical sources suggest that a favorite tea bowl of the 8th Ashikaga Shogun, Ashikaga Yoshimasa (1436-1490), had been sent to China for repairs and was returned with unsightly metal staples. Displeased, he ordered a substitute be found and kintsugi was born.
Collectors became so enhamoured with this new art, some even deliberately broke valuable pottery so it could be repaired with the gold of kintsugi.
In addition to serving as an aesthetic principle, kintsugi has long represented the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, which calls for seeing beauty in the flawed or imperfect. The repair method was also born from the Japanese feeling of mottainai, which expresses regret when something is wasted, as well as mushin, the acceptance of change.
I’m attracted to the symbolism of this beautiful art—taking something broken and highlighting it’s cracks/wounds, emphasizing the broken parts of ourselves and honoring it in gold. As if to say that by doing our “work” we are becoming stronger, more beautiful and whole again.
I stumbled across a book I wanted to share called Kintsugi Wellness by Candice Kumai. Parts of her documentary are available online, here. Candice opens with, "We all come from broken places. We can take those broken pieces and turn them into something truly beautiful.”
Kintsugi can stand as a symbol for our personal and historical wounds.
What does Kintsugi symbolize for you, personally?
When I reflect on this, I immediately think back to my body physically breaking in a serious car accident. At the age of 20, I shattered my spine in two places, L4 and T6. I was flown to Santa Clara Trauma Center where I waited for a week on morphine for a space to open up at Stanford. I spent this week trying to manage extreme pain, picking glass out of my head and listening to it drop to the ground while listening to the chaotic sounds of patients in trauma and trying to navigate through family dynamics. Stanford fused me together with bone grafts and 8” metal c-clamps. As a young independent adult (who had moved out at 17), I was now back at home. The stillness of bed rest would allow the shattered spine to attract to the bone grafts and strengthen me. Eventually, I would learn to walk again-a very awkward process that required a lot of patience and kindness to myself. First with a walker and back brace then, gradually without the walker. It was a lonely time. Time was slow. Very few people visited-family or friends. They didn’t know how to sit there with me, to just talk, to ask me how I felt. I can only guess that it was too real, too scary…My friends were in an “immortal” stage of life, as I had been, previously. This alone time and healing would change me forever, internally and physically into a new person. There were so many lessons from the trauma of the accident to becoming independent again. The experience gave me a deeper understanding of myself and those around me. This is the gold.
