TravelPrep

Darkness is an indispensable element element of the beauty of lacquerware. Nowadays they make even a white laquer, but the lacquerware of the past was finished in black, brown, or red, colors built up of countless layers of darkness, the inevitable product of the darkness in which life was lived. Sometimes a piece of black lacquerware, decorated perhaps with flecks of silver and gold-a box or a desk or a set of shelves-will seem to me unsettlingly garish and altogether vulgar. But render pitch black the void in which they stand, and light them not with the rays of the sun or electricity but rather a single lantern or candle: suddenly those garish objects turn somber, refined, dignified…Lacquerware decorated in gold is not something to be seen in brilliant light, to be taken in at a single glance; it should be left in the dark, a part here and a part there picked up by a faint light…The sheen of of lacquer, set out in the night, reflects the wavering candlelight, announcing the drafts that find their way from time to time into the quiet room, luring one into a state of reverie…Indeed the thin, impalpable, faltering light, picked up as though little rivers were running through the room, collecting little pools here and there, lacquers a pattern on the surface of the night itself.