Epilogue

The first thing I thought when I I first saw work made from urushi and leather was that a new material had been created. New methods for leather working. Paint. Dyeing. All of those draw a clear, straight line. But with this, we have an entirely new feel of a material. I was certain that a truly new material had been created.

But even if you hear the production process, you won’t completely get it. That’s how unsure we were about what to do with it. How do we go about using this to create something? It really was an extremely innovative technique. So my initial impression was “What do we do with this?”.

 

After that, Mr. Motoike went independent and ended up working with me for my first gallery project, but he told me that he wouldn’t showcase the shippi.
We both had a mutual understanding about that.
As far as why we didn’t use it, it’s because we felt that it may become one of his representative works. His life work. In the beginning, we felt that much potential in it. At the same time, we both acknowledged the truth that we needed an overwhelming amount of time to think about the direction we wanted to take with this leather.
It might be strange for me to say that we wanted to leave it idle. We wanted to put time into thinking about how we wanted to create with that material. We both had a feeling that we should do that, so under the premise that we wouldn’t show it at the first exhibition, we decided to get acquainted with this new material.