On a breezy spring evening in Tokyo, as the cherry blossoms stirred into bloom, a cohort of artists, craftspeople, and tastemakers gathered in Harajuku for an exhibition that felt distinctly of the moment.
Japan has long revered craft, from ceramics and lacquerware to centuries-old textile traditions, a rich history embodied by master artisans designated as “Living National Treasures.”
LOEWE “Crafted World”, Tokyo. Courtesy LOEWE.
Yet today, aesthetic tastes are shifting, particularly amid new expectations for the world’s fourth-largest economy, which has long stagnated in the “lost decades” since the asset price bubble burst in 1990. The combined wealth of the country’s richest 50 people is an estimated $200 billion, and younger generations are being courted at warp speed by luxury boutiques and contemporary art events like Art Week Tokyo, Art Collaboration Kyoto, and Tokyo Gendai.
This new generation isn’t flocking to traditional craft with the same devotion as their parents. Nor are they wholly taken in by the hype of luxury fashion or the conceptual edge of contemporary art. But in the places where these worlds meet—something is stirring.
LOEWE “Crafted World”, Tokyo. Courtesy LOEWE.
Enter “Crafted World,” an exhibition that traces the nearly 180-year history of Spanish fashion brand Loewe. Since 2013, under the creative direction of Jonathan Anderson (who stepped down in March, and is widely rumored to be heading to Dior), the brand has become a cultural force. The recently credited the Irish designer with transforming the brand from what had been “a minor Spanish leathergoods house” into “a cultural lodestar.” Anderson achieved this by emphasizing craft, drawing on art history—from surrealism to the avant-garde—as inspiration for his designs, filling stores with works from the Loewe Foundation art collection, and initiatives like the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize.
“When Jonathan asked [us] to create a Craft Prize, it was a magic moment for me, the chance to make one of my father’s long-standing dreams come true,” foundation president Sheila Loewe told me, adding that the prize, founded in 2016, is her proudest initiative. “Craft has always been one of my father’s great passions and when he created the Loewe Foundation 37 years ago to support culture and the arts, it was always his ambition that eventually we would have a prize dedicated to craft.”
LOEWE “Crafted World”, Tokyo. Courtesy LOEWE.
“I think Jonathan’s success was in identifying and nurturing what had been there since the beginning at Loewe: a true and deep love for craft” Loewe added, “and his legacy will be that culture is now a part of everything that Loewe does.”
Nowhere is that clearer than in the house’s own universe of sculptural creations, from Lynda Benglis’s resin bangles to the latest runway references to fiber artist Anni Albers. Monumental works like Anthea Hamilton’s enormous leather pumpkins and Haegue Yang’s plastic-twine sculptures, which have served as striking visual anchors for the runway presentations, sit alongside works by Craft Prize finalists and other artists who’ve inspired the brand’s sensibility, from Picasso’s ceramics to Studio Ghibli characters by Hayao Miyazaki.
LOEWE “Crafted World”, Tokyo. Courtesy LOEWE.
Of the works on view, I was drawn to the visual trickery of a speckled, swirling vessel by Takayuki Sakiyama, etched with ripple marks, as if the solid ceramic could crumble like sand. Contrarily, Annie Turner’s red-grogged stoneware clay, glazed with lithium and fired with yellow-iron oxide, visually transformed this fragile object into a weathered, rusted lobster trap. Nearby, an enigmatic cube coated in an oil-slick sheen by Tomonari Hashimoto, known for large-scale ceramics that often require the construction of custom kilns, looked like an object from outer space.
I spoke with Genta Ishizuka, who works with urushi laquer, a traditional sap technique dating from around the 7th or 8th century. Ishizuka won the Craft Prize in 2019, and his winning object, (2018), is a lustrous form inspired by a bulging bag of oranges, which has been buffed and polished to a tortoise-shell effect. Lacquerware—with its painstaking layering and cure times—is finding renewed attention. Genta told me he prefers the medium to ceramics as, despite the inherent quirks of working with natural materials, it offers more control over the outcome than resigning to the fortunes of the kiln.
LOEWE “Crafted World”, Tokyo. Courtesy LOEWE.
In an age when “luxury” has become synonymous with overconsumption and spectacle, “Crafted World” offers a reminder that the roots of refinement lie in the handmade. The exhibition positions craft as a living language, shared between generations, disciplines, and cultures. And in doing so, it gestures to a shift happening across the contemporary art world: the slow undoing of the false binary between artist and artisan.
Yet for some makers, that line still serves a purpose: not to divide, but to clarify intent.
“The difference between a craftsman and an artist,” Genta Ishizuka offered, “is that a craftsman needs to make the same thing over and over again by hand. I’m also using my hands—but this piece is only coming out once. That’s what makes me an artist.”
It would seem then, in a copy-paste culture obsessed with speed and homogeneity, the most radical thing an artist—or a brand—can do is slow down. To trace a line with the hand. To make something singular, and to mean it.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
