“A language is not just words. It’s a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It’s all embodied in a language.”
Vase. Kyoto, Japan. 1900-1905. Cloisonné enamel, silver wire, applied with
silver rim and foot
height 17.3 cm. A
cloisonné enamel vase with a squat rounded body and tall slightly flared neck
worked in silver wire with stems of trailing wisteria, the flowers in shaded
tones of purple and the leaves in pale green, on a pale green-brown ground.
Applied with silver rim and foot. The
depiction of the wisteria is extraordinarily naturalistic within the canons of
that style of Nihonga painting Namikawa followed, which owed a direct
debt to the Shijo school. The use of wire as an entity in itself, where it does
not enclose enamel, is visible here for the first time, the tendrils tailing
off into sprigs of wire. Text and image
via Khalili Collection
Tori