Red black-slipped gold Kairagi Shino egg

Red Black-Slipped Gold Kairagi Shino Egg (2010) is a striking and beautiful work by the Japanese artist Takuro Kuwata. An ovoid form in two halves – the upper red, the lower black – appears to have burst out of an opulent gold shell, whose cracked remains adhere to the top section, gleaming in vivid contrast to the red beneath. Kuwata, who has shown extensively in Japan and who last year was the subject of a solo exhibition curated by Jeffrey Uslip at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, is fascinated by the beauty that is born from destruction. Born in Hiroshima, but removed from the aftermath of World War II, he offers a contemporary view of postwar Japanese anxiety as well as exploring a correlation between Japan’s recent natural and social disasters. The natural world plays an active role in Kuwata’s practice, with bursting stones and broken glazes acting as metaphors for erupting volcanoes and earthquakes. The form of an egg perfectly encapsulates his ideas: an egg, of course, creates new life, but is shattered at the moment of creation. Among the many traditional Japanese techniques that he employs is kairagi, which is used, as in the present work, to create imperfections in the glaze through shrinking and cracking. Kuwata pushes this to its extreme so that the outer layer of his sculpture is fractured and appears to be slipping away from the colour beneath. This kairagi method introduces a lack of control and a degree of uncertainty that enhances the dysfunctional, organic nature of the object. Kuwata re-envisions the Japanese aesthetic philosophy of wabi-sabi, which focuses on the beauty of incompletion and imperfection, in a captivating work of broken splendour.