Mayu Nakata Bloom (2021)

“Bloom” by Mayu Nakata is her first work made specifically for an European audience, effectively illustrating Nakata’s prowess with simple forms while harnessing lacquer’s ability to be coloured in pigments other than with traditional reds and blacks. ‘Kinma’, a technique of lacquering originally borne in Southeast Asia, is obsessively time-consuming and notoriously labour-intensive, and each work by Nakata ultimately takes approx. two to three months for completion. First, Nakata creates a basic body silhouette from linen cloth, thereby lacquering a sleek vessel form into existence. Then, the artist painstakingly carves intricate patterns into the surface of the lacquer with a knife-like blade, essentially engraving the entirety of the piece with rippling patterns that are then inlaid with pigmented lacquer of vivid yellows and golds. This process is repeated throughout Bloom, and as a grand finale, the work is polished smoothly in its entirety to give the appearance as if the lacquer and the body are virtually seamless – a Kagawa lacquering characteristic passed down since the 19th century. Nakata often says that each piece she creates is essentially telling a story that links the persons of tomorrow with the persons of the past, as a dialogue in time that captures the ephemeral with the eternal. Indeed, in the work that is Bloom, Nakata captures the beauty of time itself.