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The Beauty of the Commonplace: Japan's Mingei
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11350 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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11 / 1986 |
2,184 Words |
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Janet Koplos
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This year the Nippon Mingeikan - the Japan Folk Crafts Museum - is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. 'Mingei' is a made-up word that became a movement, and the museum is an invention that has become an institution.
The word was coined in the early part of this century by Soetsu Yanagi (1889-1961), a philosopher interested in the arts. He took part of the Japanese word meaning "common people" and part of the word for "crafts," and put them together to describe the handsome utilitarian pottery, clothing, and everyday tools and special-occasion decorations made by common people for common people. He was not interested in the rarified beauty of objects created from exotic materials for wealthy or aristocratic patrons. Instead he developed a philosophy of the "healthy" beauty of mingei.
The word has been accepted into the Japanese language and is now applied to specific kinds of crafts, as well as to shops selling such things, to a dozen museums across Japan, and even to one abroad (Mingei International in San Diego).
It all started with a gift of Korean pottery. About seventy years ago a friend who had visited Seoul gave Yanagi a gift of a small pottery jar decorated with grassy flowers and white glaze. This jar (now in the Mingeikan's collection of Korean Yi dynasty pottery) is a humble, unprepossessing object that few of us would think to look at closely, but somehow it caught his fancy. Not long after that he visited Korea, and the die was cast.
The Mingei Movement grew from that beginning. Korea was the first to benefit, as Yanagi played an important part in the founding of the Korean Folk Crafts Museum in Seoul in 1926. He is credited with having sparked the Koreans' interest in their own folk heritage.
Relations between Korea and Japan were strained at that time (as they unfortunately continue to be) because Japan had anneged that nation in 1910. The Koreans were forced to assimilate Japanese culture. Yet there was Yanagi celebrating Korea's own specific heritage and characteristic crafts.
Yi dynasty pottery was not valued at that time-not in Japan, nor in Korea. It had been produced in great quantities for practical purposes, so no one considered it anything special. This delight in the commonplace was typical of Yanagi and can be seen as the creed of the Mingei Movement. The process was repeated when Yanagi turned his attention to his homeland. Over the years, he traveled extensively, often with friends who were also interested in aesthetics. Among them was Bernard Leach, an Englishman who had come to Japan to teach etching but who instead became a potter and was the seminal figure in carrying the aesthetics of folk pottery to the West. Others were friends from Shirakaba, an avant-garde magazine edited by Yanagi that introduced modern Western art to Japan.
Yanagi also developed a close affiliation with certain artist craftsmen who were quite unlike the "unknown craftsmen" who made mingei (The Unknown Craftsman was. his influential English-language book, edited by Bernard Leach after Yanagi's death, and it became almost required reading for participants in the crafts revival in the United States during the 1960s and 1970). These artist-craftsmen were mostly educated, sophisticated men, but they appreciated mingei
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