Roundtable

Sōetsu Yanagi’s texts, The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight Into Beauty and The Beauty of Everyday Things, explore the philosophy of mingei. A reaction to Western influence and industrialization, mingei celebrated the beauty of objects of use through ideas rooted in functionality, handmade craftsmanship, tradition, and the “Unknown Craftsman”. From its inception, mingei has inspired countless individuals in their daily philosophy, including Martha Longnecker– a professor at San Diego State University, Southern Californian MidCentury ceramicist, and founding director of Mingei International Museum. Established in 1978, Mingei International Museum is a folk, craft, and design museum based in Balboa Park, San Diego, California (USA). Longnecker studied ceramics in Japan and learned from Mingei founders Shōji Hamada and Tatsuzō Shimaoka, who then inspired her to carry the vision of mingei to the U.S.A. 

While the museum’s name and essence derives from Yanagi’s concept of mingei, today Mingei (museum) exhibits an expanded exploration of what a global idea of mingei (art of the people) can be through the trifocal+ lens of folk, craft, and design. In doing so, it attempts to rectify many of the contradictions that exist in mingei philosophy through a post-colonial lens. This talk explores how the museum’s curatorial focus has shifted away from allowing objects to “speak for themselves” through a subjective idea of beauty through form; instead the museum focuses on artist (both known and unidentified), culture, and context while keeping a heavy emphasis on the craft and the objects that exist within people's daily lives. In doing so, artists and objects reveal the global interconnectedness of “local” or "traditional" craft and how artists and craft practices have adapted in order to survive. Recent exhibitions such as Blue Gold: The Art and Science of Indigo, Fashioning an Icon: Virgin of Guadalupe Imagery in Textile Design, and Across the Spooniverse additionally explore how the power and beauty of the objects themselves is not only understood through their end form, but through their context: from cultural history and artists’ intention, through the practice of the objects creation, to its interaction and use, and finally to its evolving meaning both “within” and “outside” of a culture.

In the late nineteenth-century Western world, spirits and ghosts were often materialised. They appeared in séance rooms and even left their fingerprints. The ‘modern spiritualist’ movement and psychical research formed such an unignorable intellectual context of the time that their doctrinal ideas were exported to Japan. In his 1911 work, Science and Life (Kagaku to Jinsei), Sōetsu Yanagi quotes the contemporary psychical researchers, Cesare Lombroso and Sir Oliver Lodge, to extol their spiritual quality, not the mainstream ‘dry’ science. Though he lost his interest in this intellectual milieu soon, he was still fascinated by mysticism or mystical writers until his later years. This poses a question on how he adapted the western spiritual movement in his intellectual formation. 

My talk aims to unravel the complex relation between the western spirit materialisation and Yanagi’s Mingei theory. In Japanese Modernisation and Mingei Theory: Cultural Nationalism and Oriental Orientalism (2004), Yuko Kikuchi provides a nuanced reading of his theory by arguing that ‘Yanagi created a narrative of Oriental spiritual identity, superior to that of the Occident, through the use of his own hybrid rhetoric’. By developing her argument, I will recontextualise Yanagi’s interest in ‘tangible things’ (mono) with reference to a wider range of western spiritualist figures, such as not only spiritualists and psychical researchers but also related contemporary modernist intellectuals, particularly Roger Fry and Virginia Woolf. 

The tangible/intangible dualism offers a significant aesthetic framework for establishing Yanagi’s folk craft (mingei) theory. This talk explores two sources Yanagi’s idea of mono converses with: the conceptual approach of modern art and the epistemological approach of ethnography. Yanagi’s term ‘tangible things’ (mono) projects his approach to spirituality through immediate tangible substance as a field of axiology for gaining the value of beauty. Demonstrating the tangible matter, he juxtaposed ‘tangible things’ and ‘intangible things’ (koto), prioritising the former for its intuitional agency, which polarises the latter as cognitive knowledge and abstract concepts build rules with preconditions. 

More recently, Tim Ingold’s engagement in ‘things’ brings art and anthropology together through the correspondence of their studies, which share a concern to awaken the inside of being in the unfolding of life. This perspective takes art as an open-ended practice rather than a static result, product, or, in the ethnographic term, ‘object’. With a Heideggerian approach, Ingold’s notion of ‘things’ echoes Yanagi’s emphasis on the tangible significance of a form’s self-sustained character in anchoring dynamic subjective experience through ‘making’, which cannot be defined as terms of conceptual objectness in any predetermined sense. As Martin Heidegger stressed, we apprehend a thing ‘never as a mere object’. Via Yanagi’s inter-cultural engagement, the talk probes the possibility of bridging ontological and metaphysical aspects to view a thing’s artistic entity beyond the categories in terms of arts and crafts and ethnographic objects.