A Visit with Masamitsu Saito, Bamboo Art Collector

Text by Ryota Aoyagi [contemporary artist]

I enjoy everything, no matter the country, period, or genre. I value intuition in my encounters with art—I have often boasted this claim when questioned on my preferences. But there is, in fact, one genre that I have secretly resisted: Japanese traditional crafts. My awareness of my distaste for Japanese crafts seeps into my subconscious, so that I glance at it quickly and move on, without consciously intending to avoid it. As to why I resist traditional crafts, let me first state forthright—I deeply respect craftsmen. There should be no misunderstanding on this point. I also worry that current conditions preventing craftsmen from making a living as craftsmen, so that they must create as “artists,” mean the decline of Japanese culture. Craftsmen originally worked on the basis of division of labor, I hear, but today, such specialization is disappearing. If we look at lacquer craft, for example, young makers are increasingly undertaking both the lathework and lacquering single-handed. In terms of workloads and costs involved, shouldering both the lathework and lacquering is difficult. The subsequent loss of exquisite craftsman techniques, carefully passed down over time, is unfortunate beyond words.

Craft-based artists, on the other hand—and this is only my personal opinion—let their technique run away with them. Because they have skills and can use them, they compound techniques, trying to do them all, so that self-gratification takes priority and the work suffers in form and lacks integrity. As a result, real needs for crafts decline and a vicious circle is created. Such is the situation today. For these reasons, even if amazing to see, traditional craftworks have not often moved me with their beauty. Until encountering the bamboo art collection of SAITO Masamitsu, that is. 

If I think about it, bamboo abounds around me in my life as a Japanese. From baskets and colanders to Japanese umbrellas, folding fans, dragonfly copters, squirt guns, teaspoons, and tea whisks, many items I use everyday without much thought are made of bamboo. A flower basket woven in the Nara period (710-794) is preserved in the Shosoin Repository, and I hear that bamboo from Kyoto was used to make filaments for the first lightbulbs. We eat bamboo shoots as a seasonal delicacy. Despite this, I am ashamed to say, I have almost no knowledge about bamboo crafts. How many Japanese actually do? “It’s only the Japanese who learn nothing from Japan,” someone once said. According to Saito, eighty percent of flower baskets and other bamboo crafts made in Japan are purchased by Western collectors. The items that Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796-1866) carried home, long ago, still now remain in his land. Japan’s bamboo crafts, after their origin by importing and copying baskets from China, flourished in the 19th century and survived in modern times due to the patronship of Westerners, not Japanese, a fact somehow both thankful and also pathetic. Bamboo, a material we in Japan take for granted, was something rare for them. When viewing bamboo baskets, moreover, they were captivated by the baskets themselves without being bound by preconceived notions. Stepping beyond frames of reference such as craftsman, artist, tool, and artwork, they grasped the object’s essence from the object itself. That bamboo works attained new creative heights surpassing their origins as copies of Chinese baskets was surely because bamboo craftsmen trained with an eye on the world, conscious of Western collectors. Seeing is believing: Saito’s collection provides solid testimony to this fact.

While listening to all that Saito had to say and viewing his bamboo art pieces, I recalled a work by lacquer craftsman Mutsumi Suzuki, in which he had bent his wood core and held it in that state while the lacquer hardened on it. The form thus produced is a direct result of the force of the wood core to return to its original form and the resisting force of the hardened lacquer. I felt the same forces at work in the bamboo pieces, that is, the tension between the human force of bending the bamboo and the force of the bamboo to return to its original form. Because of that tension, a form having dynamism is created instead of a lifeless artificial object. The work exudes charm because the character of the bamboo is directly apparent in its form. If utility were the maker’s sole aim, he would not have woven such a complex form. We can only feel admiration for the bamboo craftsman’s passion, in bygone times, to elevate the tool to the level of art. The craftsman was devoted—he would have persisted in creating bamboo craftworks blending simplicity and complex modern beauty even if people in Japan were unaware of his endeavor.

I will finish with a story that Saito related to me. Rokansai Iizuka has a work that almost exactly copies the shape of a folk basket, an everyday work tool. The market value of a Rokansai work being tens of thousands of times that of a folk basket, it was an extremely ambitious and risky conceptual work, needless to say. A basket, even by Rokansai, is a basket. Without a great deal of confidence, such a work could not have been attempted. Rokansai doubtless felt deep respect for the beauty of the folk basket, this being the probable reason he copied it. He may have also intended the piece as a humorous dig at the high prices his work commanded. I was freshly surprised that Rokansai, born in the late 19th century, would engage in conceptual expression so contemporary in spirit. The one who knew nothing about bamboo crafts, after all, was me.

I enjoy everything, no matter the country, period, or genre.
In Saito’s collection, I came across one bamboo piece I wanted so badly.