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Celine’s ‘Maki-E’ Exhibition Brings to Life Traditional Japanese Craft
At the Osaka-Kansai World Expo, Celine celebrates centuries of traditional craft, from urushi lacquer techniques to fine leathermaking.
P assing through a familiar place, it’s often the smallest, most mundane details that stop you in your tracks, causing you to wonder: Has that always been there?
Such was perhaps the feeling experienced by lifelong Paris resident Céline Vipiana, when, in 1971, in her mid-50s, she found herself stranded next to the Arc de Triomphe after her car broke down. For the first time, the idiosyncratic ornamentation of the metal chain links encircling the landmark caught her attention. They appeared like two decorative, curving forms, like Cs facing outward – one the mirror of the other. As the founder of then-fledgling high-fashion brand Celine, Madame Vipiana took note of the insignia for her rapidly expanding womenswear and accessories lines. Hence came to be the Celine Triomphe logo, doubling as an homage to the city that fundamentally shaped both the iconic brand and the woman who originated it 80 years ago.
“The Japanese concept of ‘onko chishin’ means to create something new with a proper understanding of what has always existed.”
- Master Takashi Wakayima
The symbol and its history are also front and center at this year’s Osaka-Kansai World Expo, where Celine, as an ambassador for France, is presenting an installation in the country’s pavilion. Namely, the house unveiled an exhibition named “Maki-e,” which presents three large Triomphe sculptures carved out of Katsura wood and finished in a traditional Japanese natural lacquer known as urushi. These embody the results of the maki-e lacquer technique, which dates back centuries in Japan.
To bring the exhibition to life, Celine partnered with the lauded Hikoju Makie studio, based in the town of Wajima, Japan, where the practice has especially strong roots. The art of maki-e, executed with a delicate touch and delivering a mesmerizing, refined finish, was a harmonious fit in rendering the regal Triomphe logo. Each of the three pieces on view is a different color – vermillion, black and gold – and all are emblazoned with patterns of bamboo, pine and plum motifs. The exhibition also commemorates a kind of homecoming: Madame Vipiana devised the Triomphe logo just one year after Celine made its Japanese debut in 1970. In all of these ways and more, the three Triomphe sculptures from Hikoju Makie are something of the physical incarnations of Celine’s intertwining history with the country.
“The Triomphe urushi art pieces we are producing are made of natural wood, and the lacquer is also natural,” said the studio’s late leader, Master Takashi Wakayima, who passed away shortly before the exhibition’s opening. “What we try to do is to create works in a way that could coexist with nature, with human hands working hard to create something.”
The vermillion is made with cinnabar – a pigment made out of crushed rocks, all the more vivid thanks to a touch of mercury – and represents “resurrection and rebirth” in Japanese culture, Wakayima continued. The black harkens to aristocratic tastes, conjuring a formal quality. And the gold “represents the sun, since it’s very bright.”
For Master Wakayima, the sculptures both protect and continue important traditional craft techniques. “There is this Japanese concept of onko chishin, which means to create something new with a proper understanding of what has always existed,” he said. “Just because something from the Edo period is good does not mean that the same thing could be done today and be appreciated. Therefore, I think it is necessary to create something better, or something that suits the current era. In that sense, it is necessary for people who grew up in contemporary times to study the past and create.”
Elsewhere in the exhibition, the three shades of the urushi Triomphe totems are echoed in an adjoining display of three handmade leather bags, featuring the Triomphe logos as gold clasps, manufactured in Celine’s atelier exclusively for the exposition.
Capturing the makings of the trio of urishi sculptures and the bags is a video by Japanese artist and filmmaker Soshi Nakamura. Titled “Hands at Work,” it juxtaposes the ongoings at Hikoju Makie as the studio produced the Triomphe pieces with the happenings at Celine’s workshop in the Radda commune in Chianti, Italy, where the bags were painstakingly assembled.
“Tradition is not only about preserving something, but also about living in the moment, moving one’s hands and connecting them to the next.”
- Filmmaker Soshi Nakamura
“As I watched the craftsmen’s hand movements and the way they faced the materials, I realized that technique is not merely skillfulness, but rather a relationship that has been nurtured with people, the environment, and time,” offers Nakamura on what he learned over the filmmaking process. “Hikokuju Makie and Celine – two crafts that have continued in different places – share the same attitude of questioning what ‘tradition’ means. It is not only about preserving something, but also about living in the moment, moving one’s hands and connecting them to the next.”
A second video by Namakura, “Ten Landscapes of Dreams,” creates a fantasy inspired by the poetic and aesthetic interplay between the Triomphe emblem and the landscape of Japan, further creating visual dazzle within a mirrored installation. “I interpreted the story as a symbol that represents the timeless techniques and spirituality that have been passed down from generation to generation, rather than a tangible object that represents the Triomphe. In the video, the Triomphe basically appears in natural phenomena, such as light, shadow or wind.“ says the filmmaker. “At the Expo site, the images reflected in the mirrors sometimes evoke a sense of harmony and storytelling, like a folding screen painting, and change their expression according to the viewer”s perspective and emotions. The images are depicted as an existence that continues to travel forever, just like a dream, fluctuating between the imaginary image in the mirror and the real image.”
He further reflects on broader guiding concepts that carry through the core messages of the exhibition: “What ‘Hands at Work’ and ‘Ten Landscapes of Dreams’ have in common is the theme of connection and inheritance. While the latter offers an image that leaves room for the viewer to imagine what is to come, the former records the quiet succession of technology in reality through the movement of hands and the relationship between materials.“
On the whole, “Maki-e” not only highlights the finer points of the Japanese lacquerware tradition but also is an homage to the hard-won skills and labor necessary to creates objects of a certain peerless level – whether in the romanticized past or the overwhelming present – in all their glorious details. As Master Wakamiya put it: “I think there’s meaning in absorbing the traditions that we’re passing on, destroying and reinterpreting them within ourselves, and so in order to create something new again.”
