Year: 2025
Medium: wood, lacquer, soil, sand
Dimensions: 12.5 x 12.5 x 7.2 cm (4 7/8 x 4 7/8 x 2 7/8 in.)
Acquired from Fushimi Port Sangoan, 2025
Although it has a rough texture that resembles stone or pottery, this piece is in fact a wooden bowl that was created using lacquer-coating techniques. This piece was produced through a collaboration between the Kikai Institute for Coral Reef Sciences, a research facility specializing in coral reefs, and Kyoto-based lacquer artisan Takuya Tsutsumi. Part of the Amami archipelago off the shore of Kagoshima Prefecture, Kikaijima is a raised coral reef island known for its rapid uplift—currently approximately at two millimeters a year, a speed rarely seen anywhere else in the world. In this work, the base wooden bowl is coated with lacquer collected from various parts of the island: the lower layer consists of mud and sand believed to have been deposited three million to 1.7 million years ago (before the island’s formation); the middle layer uses sand from 1.7 million to 1.4 million years ago when the island began to rise; the top layer includes sediments from 850,000 years ago and onwards. The expansive timeline and scale of Kikaijima’s rise from the depths of the ocean are condensed into a single bowl. In this work, the material of lacquer—one that has long supported people’s lives since the Jomon period as a technique and material—is deftly employed by the artist Tsutsumi as a robust medium that binds together the time and materiality of Kikaijima itself.
