Positioning Modern Craft within the Practice of Global Modern Art

In 1910, Japanese sculptor Takamura Kōtarō published a seven-line satirical poem titled The Country of Netsuke, in which he likened the Japanese people to netsuke—small toggles once used to suspend personal belongings from the sash of a traditional waist garment. Popularly worn during Edo Japan (1603-1868), carvings of ivory netsuke frequently feature humorous, lively, and imaginative figures and animals as beloved personal accessories. Likening the Japanese to netsuke, Takamura nevertheless loathed and even detested the mimetic nature of netsuke for its decorative superficiality and despicable banality, reminiscent of those “money-like, fox-like, flying-squirrel-like, mudskipper-like, minnow-like, gargoyle-like, chip-from-a-cup-like Japanese.”

Takamura’s poem signaled the anxiety of a modern sculptor in branding artist’s identity at a land foreign to the idea of Fine Art. During late nineteenth century, the Meiji government vigorously promoted and institutionalized the fine art system in modern Japan, creating a whole generation of artists academically trained yet uprooted from practices of traditional crafting techniques.

This presentation focuses on the decade at the turn of the twentieth century, a period when many traditional craft masters and workshops in Japan faced an uncertain future—some even verging on abandoning their professions to mechanization. Yet others, particularly metalsmiths, found renewal by forging a new discourse that elevated technique as a mode of aesthetic expression. By exploring the entanglement of modern craft practices in Japan within the broader discourse of modern art, this paper repositions craft as a critical lens through which to expand and complicate the definition of global modern art.