Finding the extraordinary in the everyday - Japanese folk crafts; various artists, various galleries

Art in America, Nov, 1996 by Janet Koplos

The most dazzlingly simple Mingei forms tend to be the metal and lacquer objects, as well as some wooden boxes in which the physical properties of the material itself were obviously considered to be sufficient ornament. An 18th-century spouted bowl from Wajima, a famous lacquer-producing region along the Japan Sea coast, is part of the Montgomery Collection. It has a modest conical foot, a full belly that becomes an almost straight-sided bowl (thus more than a hemisphere) and an open-trough spout that is long enough to avoid being stubby but not so long as to draw attention away from the bowl. The glossy red-orange lacquer accents the curves of the form through the differential reflection of light. Other lacquer examples in the exhibitions exemplify different tastes, such as pictorial decoration (a stylized pine tree on a platter) and a rubbed surface that simulates the effects of age (abraded-red-over-black negoro lacquerware). A reductive brass hibachi in the Mingeikan show has three robust legs and two inverted-heart cutouts high on the sides that can serve as handles or accommodate a rod. The hard-edged rim has been slightly rounded, while the legs are cylindrical but given a prominent vertical crease. A gourd-shaped iron teakettle (Montgomery) is also notable for its simplicity.

Mingei ceramics are more often decorated, although they are given standardized motifs that the process abstracted, especially when the artisan worked by rote to repeat learned forms for quantity production. A common Seto stoneware plate made to place under an oil lamp or candle to catch drips, for example, might be decorated with rapid brushstrokes of iron pigment suggesting wild grasses. Imari porcelain noodle cups and tea cups were decorated with an inventive variety of motifs painted exclusively in cobalt blue. Poured glazes, such as those on the shoulder of a Tatenoshita stoneware jar, approach a contemporary sense of abstract beauty.

Some textiles have a graphic crispness. This is particularly notable in the Mingeikan show (Yanagi, having collected half a century before Montgomery, acquired more stellar examples of the most perishable goods). A deerskin fireman's coat is a blocky T-shape boldly stenciled with identifying or auspicious calligraphic characters, and an Ainu cotton robe (the Ainu are a racial minority indigenous to Japan) is an equally simple shape appliqued with an almost crystalline pattern. The Japanese excelled at textile techniques that produced complicated effects, and these can be seen in folk pieces as well as silk luxury goods excluded from these shows. For instance, a hemp door curtain (noren) is elaborately pictorial. It has been dyed with indigo using the paste-resist method to reserve the cloth's natural color for the outline of a hawk targeting its prey in the waves crashing around great rocks.

Okinawan textiles and ceramics tend to be densely decorated with a softer stylizing less visually akin to modern design and more reflective of tropical color and vigor. Okinawa, once the independent kingdom of Ryukyu but annexed to Japan in 1879, was another of Yanagi's special interests. He and Hamada made collecting trips to Okinawa in the '30s, a happenstance that came to seem providential when those islands were devastated in World War II battles. The Mingeikan collection of more than 1,000 items is by far the best contemporary source of prewar Okinawan artifacts, including funerary jars and the bright cotton kimono called bingata.