Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese car­pen­try impress­es us today, not so much with the tools its prac­ti­tion­ers use as with the ones they don’t: nails, for exam­ple. Or glue, for that mat­ter. Here on Open Cul­ture we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured intro­duc­tions to Japan­ese wood join­ery, the art of cut­ting wood in a man­ner such that pieces slide togeth­er and solid­ly inter­lock with­out the aid of any oth­er mate­ri­als. Though it may seem like mag­ic, it’s real­ly just physics — or rather, physics, and engi­neer­ing, and the branch­es of biol­o­gy rel­e­vant to grow­ing the right wood. For the tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese car­pen­ter him­self, it all comes down to exten­sive train­ing and prac­tice.

Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese car­pen­try need not even be done in Japan. Take Miya Sho­ji, the New York City shop pro­filed in the Chi­na Uncen­sored video above. Under cur­rent own­er Hisao Hana­fusa, who came to the Unit­ed States in 1963, it makes and sells fur­ni­ture craft­ed using canon­i­cal tech­niques, but in ser­vice of par­tic­u­lar pieces quite unlike any found in Japan.

Part of the dif­fer­ence comes from the wood itself: as it would be sourced only local­ly in Japan, so it’s sourced only local­ly in the Unit­ed States. This video shows the felling of a 300-year-old tree, killed by Dutch elm dis­ease, and its trans­for­ma­tion into slabs des­tined to become Miya Sho­ji tables.

There­after, the dry­ing process could take twen­ty years. “By the time the wood hits the cut­ting bench, it is already near­ing the end of its jour­ney.” But the car­pen­ter still has to craft the joints need­ed to hold the fin­ished piece togeth­er “like a three-dimen­sion­al puz­zle” — and with a set of hand tools, at that. The very same tech­niques have been used to con­struct tem­ples in Japan that can stand for a mil­len­ni­um, and indeed go back even deep­er into his­to­ry than that, hav­ing evolved from car­pen­try per­formed in 6th- and 7th-cen­tu­ry Chi­na. Here in the 21st cen­tu­ry, con­nois­seurs of every nation­al­i­ty have come to appre­ci­ate the wabi-sabi aes­thet­ic and tran­scen­dent sim­plic­i­ty of fur­ni­ture so con­struct­ed — a sim­plic­i­ty that sure­ly does­n’t come cheap.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Join­ery: A Kyoto Wood­work­er Shows How Japan­ese Car­pen­ters Cre­at­ed Wood Struc­tures With­out Nails or Glue

See How Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Car­pen­ters Can Build a Whole Build­ing Using No Nails or Screws

Japan­ese Car­pen­ters Unearth 100-Year-Old Wood Joiner­ies While Tak­ing Apart a Tra­di­tion­al House

Mes­mer­iz­ing GIFs Illus­trate the Art of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Join­ery — All Done With­out Screws, Nails, or Glue

Watch Japan­ese Wood­work­ing Mas­ters Cre­ate Ele­gant & Elab­o­rate Geo­met­ric Pat­terns with Wood

Free Soft­ware Lets You Cre­ate Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Joints & Fur­ni­ture: Down­load Tsug­ite

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

It looks like some­thing out of a Felli­ni movie: a string quar­tet float­ing down the canals of Venice on a gigan­tic vio­lin. Not a boat mas­querad­ing as a vio­lin, like when you dress up your pet for Hal­loween and just slap some fun­ny ears and coat on it, but an actu­al 39-foot long vio­lin, made of sev­er­al kinds of wood and met­al by mas­ter boatbuilder/wood sculp­tor Liv­io De Marchi.

“Noah’s Vio­lin,” as it is called, did have a tiny motor inside to pro­pel it, and its trip down the Grand Canal was intend­ed as a por­tent of a post-COVID world. De Marchi told the New York Times that the vio­lin was a “sign of Venice restart­ing,” and like Noah’s Ark, would bring hope after the del­uge.

Musi­cians on board played works by Vival­di, who was also an inspi­ra­tion to the woodworker/boatmaker, and who was like­wise born in Venice. The sur­prise is not so much that a string quar­tet is play­ing on top of the vio­lin, but that it all seems so stur­dy and safe. There are no hand rails or life jack­ets to be seen. (Accord­ing to the Times, wind blew some of the score into the canal, where it was quick­ly res­cued).

De Marchi has made sev­er­al sur­re­al boats, start­ing with a large wood­en repli­ca of a paper ship, a float­ing origa­mi crane, a large high-heeled shoe, and recent­ly an all-wood recre­ation of a Fer­rari that put­tered up and and down the canal.

The vio­lin boat was fol­lowed by crowds in gon­do­las and oth­er tourist boats, float­ed about for an hour, and then was docked, where it was blessed by a priest. A muse­um in Chi­na and an Ital­ian com­pa­ny expressed inter­est in find­ing the vio­lin-boat a home.

Who knows what might hap­pen to it, but why not strap some power­boat motors on it, hire Apoc­a­lyp­ti­ca and let ‘er rip?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Venice Works: 124 Islands, 183 Canals & 438 Bridges

A Relax­ing 3‑Hour Tour of Venice’s Canals

The Authen­tic Vivaldi’s The Four Sea­sons: Watch a Per­for­mance Based on Orig­i­nal Man­u­scripts & Played with 18th-Cen­tu­ry Instru­ments

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

When west­ern­ers first dis­cov­ered the work of Japan­ese wood­cut artist Kat­sushi­ka Hoku­sai, it was pri­mar­i­ly through his late-career print The Great Wave off Kana­gawa and the series from which it came, Thir­ty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, after the open­ing of Japan to inter­na­tion­al trade and the mass con­sump­tion of Japan­ese art in the late 19th cen­tu­ry. Impres­sion­ists like Claude Mon­et and Vin­cent van Gogh went wild for Japan­ese prints; Claude Debussy com­posed La mer; artists, arti­sans, and archi­tects on both sides of the Atlantic fell for all things Japon­isme.

Hoku­sai died in 1849 and did not live to see this new­found inter­na­tion­al admi­ra­tion. When he com­plet­ed The Great Wave, he was in his sev­en­ties — a mas­ter of his craft who had him­self absorbed sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence from west­ern painters.

Dur­ing his “for­ma­tive expe­ri­ence of Euro­pean art,” John-Paul Stonard writes at The Guardian, Hoku­sai “learnt from Euro­pean prints brought into Japan by Dutch traders.” He took these lessons in direc­tions all his own, how­ev­er. His Mount Fuji prints “could not have been fur­ther from any­thing being made in Europe at the time.”

Hoku­sai’s Euro­pean and Amer­i­can enthu­si­asts saw only the barest glimpse of his body of work, which we can now ful­ly appre­ci­ate in exhi­bi­tions in per­son and online. And we can now appre­ci­ate a series of draw­ings that have been hid­den away for over sev­en­ty years and were hard­ly seen at all in the 200 years since their cre­ation. Made for an unpub­lished ency­clo­pe­dia titled Ban­mot­su eon dais­es zu (The Great Pic­ture Book of Every­thing), “The draw­ings were long thought for­got­ten,” Valenti­na Di Lis­cia writes at Hyper­al­ler­gic, “last record­ed at an auc­tion in Paris in 1948 before they resur­faced in 2019.”

Made some­time between 1820 and the 1840s, “the metic­u­lous, post­card-sized works are known as hanshita‑e, a term for the final draw­ings used to carve the key blocks in Japan­ese wood­block print­ing.” These are usu­al­ly destroyed in the process, but since the prints were nev­er made, for rea­sons unknown, “the del­i­cate illus­tra­tions remained intact, mount­ed on cards and stored in a cus­tom-made wood­en box.” The draw­ings depict every­thing from “the typ­i­cal inhab­i­tants of lands in East, South­east, and Cen­tral Asian and beyond” to one of the 33 man­i­fes­ta­tions of the bod­hisatt­va Aval­okiteś­vara, “Drag­on head Kan­non.”

At the top, cura­tor Alfred Haft walks us through his favorite draw­ings from the set, and you can see all 103 of the diminu­tive illus­tra­tions online at the British Muse­um. For­mer­ly owned by the col­lec­tor and Art Nou­veau jew­el­er Hen­ri Vev­er, the prints could have inspired many a west­ern artist, but it seems they were hid­den away and have been seen by very few eyes. Dis­cov­er them your­self for the first time here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Great Wave Off Kana­gawa by Hoku­sai: An Intro­duc­tion to the Icon­ic Japan­ese Wood­block Print in 17 Min­utes

Thir­ty-Six Views of Mount Fuji: A Deluxe New Art Book Presents Hokusai’s Mas­ter­piece, Includ­ing “The Great Wave Off Kana­gawa”

The Evo­lu­tion of The Great Wave off Kana­gawa: See Four Ver­sions That Hoku­sai Paint­ed Over Near­ly 40 Years

Hokusai’s Icon­ic Print, “The Great Wave off Kana­gawa,” Recre­at­ed with 50,000 LEGO Bricks

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

They wouldn’t have let Jean-Michel into a Tiffany’s if he want­ed to use the bath­room or if he went to buy an engage­ment ring and pulled a wad of cash out of his pock­et. 

– Stephen Tor­ton, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s stu­dio assis­tant

When Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Unti­tled (Skull) sold for $110.5 mil­lion in 2017 to Japan­ese bil­lion­aire Yusaku Mae­sawa, the artist joined the ranks of Da Vin­ci, De Koon­ing, and Picas­so as one of the top sell­ing painters in the world, sur­pass­ing a pre­vi­ous record set in 2013 by his men­tor Andy Warhol’s work. Unti­tled dates from 1982, dur­ing “the young Basquiat’s mer­cu­r­ial ear­ly years,” writes Ben Davis at Art­net, “even before his first gallery show at Anni­na Nosei, when he was still a Caribbean-Amer­i­can kid from Brook­lyn ener­get­i­cal­ly boot­strap­ping him­self into the lime­light of the down­town art scene.” It is this peri­od that most inter­ests col­lec­tors like Mae­sawa.

Basquiat’s tran­si­tion from graf­fi­ti artist to art world dar­ling was dra­mat­ic, cel­e­bra­to­ry, and self-destruc­tive, all char­ac­ter­is­tics of his work. But crit­i­cal prim­i­tivism reduced him to a token — an art world atti­tude saw Basquiats as objects to be stripped of con­text, turned into dec­o­ra­tive badges of authen­tic­i­ty and world­li­ness. “Maezawa’s head paint­ing pos­sess­es a loud, gnash­ing, and con­fi­dent aura,” Shan­non Lee writes at Art­sy. But the artist’s “use of skulls… is deeply root­ed in his iden­ti­ty as a Black artist in Amer­i­ca. They are strong­ly evoca­tive of African masks, which have been so fetishized by the art mar­ket since mod­ernists like Picas­so appro­pri­at­ed them from their native con­texts.”

But head/skull motifs in Basquiat’s work are not only state­ments of dias­poric Black iden­ti­ty — they emerge through his the­mat­ic play of human embod­i­ment, men­tal illness/health, the com­pe­ti­tions of the graf­fi­ti world and the headgames of the art world, which Basquiat both mas­tered and cri­tiqued as a can­ny out­sider. “No sub­ject is more pow­er­ful or more sought after in the oeu­vre of Jean-Michel Basquiat,” notes Christie’s New York, “than the sin­gu­lar skull.” Though maybe not the most repro­duced of Basquiat’s heads, 1982’s Unti­tled — argues the Great Art Explained video above — exem­pli­fies the themes.

At only 22 years old, Basquiat pro­duced “a sin­gle paint­ing” that said “every­thing he want­ed to say about Amer­i­ca, about art and about being black in both worlds.” So sin­gu­lar is Unti­tled that it became its own one-paint­ing show in 2018 when its new own­er sent it on a tour of the world, begin­ning in the artist’s home­town at the Brook­lyn Muse­um. Maesawa’s deci­sion to share the paint­ing presents a con­trast to the way Basquiat has been treat­ed dif­fer­ent­ly by oth­er own­ers of his work like Tiffany & Co., who explain their pur­chase and recent, con­tro­ver­sial com­mer­cial use of his Equals Pi by cit­ing his “affin­i­ty for the company’s state­ment blue col­or,” writes Tirhakah Love at Dai­ly Beast — a col­or they trade­marked ten years after Basquiat’s death.

The pro­pri­etary co-opta­tion of Basquiat’s life and work to sell sym­bols of colo­nial­ism like dia­monds, among oth­er lux­u­ry goods — and the turn­ing of his work into the ulti­mate lux­u­ry good — debas­es his pur­pos­es. Why show Equals Pi “as a prop to an ad?” asked his friend and for­mer room­mate Alex­is Adler. “Loan it out to a muse­um. In a time where there were very few Black artists rep­re­sent­ed in West­ern muse­ums, that was his goal: to get to a muse­um.” Find out in the Great Art Explained video how one of his most famous — and most expen­sive — works encap­su­lates that strug­gle through its vivid col­or and sym­bol­ic visu­al lan­guage.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Take a Close Look at Basquiat’s Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Art in a New 500-Page, 14-Pound, Large For­mat Book by Taschen

The Sto­ry of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Rise in the 1980s Art World Gets Told in a New Graph­ic Nov­el

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Chaot­ic Bril­liance of Jean-Michel Basquiat: From Home­less Graf­fi­ti Artist to Inter­na­tion­al­ly Renowned Painter

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness