Kintsugi Repair

Kintsugi (金継ぎ, “golden joinery”), also known as kintsukuroi (金繕い, “golden repair”), is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, a method similar to the maki-e technique. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.

In Tomás Navarro‘s book “Kintsugi: The Japanese Art of Embracing the Imperfect and Loving Your Flaws”, he systematically introduced how to cultivate inner strength and rebuild your life with the ancient principles of kintsugi.

I didn’t try to break my beautiful Japanese bowl, but it was broken for some reason. So I decided to use Kintsugi way to bring her life back. This time I used resin and gold flakes beyond the regular gold color. I mixed the watercolor paint to the resin to give a transparent and lake-like feel, also added some gold flakes to make it more interesting.