View Bamboo masterworks by Fujitsuka Shosei
Fujitsuka Shosei Artist Statement
I am truly delighted to have the opportunity to present my work to the people of the United Kingdom here in London. I would also like to express my heartfelt gratitude and thanks to Daniel Eskenazi for making this possible.
The Japanese have long revered bamboo as a sacred plant inhabited by spirits, admired the beauty of bamboo groves and utilized bamboo as a material for various tools.
I create sculptural works using bamboo. This year marks my fifty-fourth year working with this material. In this exhibition, you will see works spanning a wide range of years, from my relatively early pieces to more recent ones. The materials also vary from sarashidake (bleached bamboo), susutake (smoked bamboo) and houbichiku (a type of bamboo with fine patterns). The colours are truly diverse – yellow, orange, brown, purple and green. Additionally, the techniques differ greatly depending on the work.
Notably, my recent works using the sai-henka (colour transformation) technique, which I newly developed using triangular strips (higo), are characterized by the intriguing visual effect in which the colours and patterns change depending on the viewing angle.
Through my works, I hope you enjoy the various sculptural beauties that bamboo, as a material, has brought into being.
Fujitsuka Shosei
Biography
1949 Born in Hokkaido, Japan
1972 Studied under bamboo artist Shodo Baba
1973 Kanagawa Prefecture Art Exhibition, Kanagawa, Japan
1992 Encouragement Award, The 15th Japan Traditional Craft Arts, New Work Exhibition
1993 Governor of Tokyo Award, The 40th Japan Traditional Craft Arts Exhibition
1994 Commissioner of the Agency for Cultural Affairs Award, The 6th Japan Traditional Craft Arts Wood and Bamboo Exhibition
2002 Finalist for Cotsen Bamboo Prize 2002
2004 Part time instructor, Tokyo University of the Arts, Japan
2006 Beyond Basketry, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA
Joined Successor Development Programme for Important Intangible Cultural Property (Bamboo Crafts)
2007-14 Contemporary Japanese Crafts, organized by Japan Foundation. Mershikov Palace, Russia; Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Sweden; The National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus, Belarus; Brunei Museum, Brunei; Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, Thailand; Museum of Decorative Arts, Cuba; National Museum, Georgia; Instituto Giapponese de Cultura, Italy; and 32 more venues
2008 New Bamboo: Contemporary Japanese Masters, Japan Society, New York, USA
2009 MOA Museum of Art Award, The 49th Japan Traditional Craft Arts Exhibition, Eastern Division
2011 Governor of Tokyo Award, The 58th Japan Traditional Craft Arts Exhibition
2012 Received the Medal with Purple Ribbon
2013 Fired Earth, Woven Bamboo: Contemporary Japanese Ceramics and Bamboo Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA
2013 From Crafts to Kogei in Commemoration of the 60th Japan Traditional Art Crafts Exhibition, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan
2014 The 19th MOA Okada Mokichi Award Exhibition, MOA Museum of Art, Shizuoka, Japan
2017 Japan Art Craft Association Award, Japan Traditional Craft Arts Exhibition, Eastern Division Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Award, The 16th Japan Traditional Craft Arts Wood and Bamboo Exhibition
2017-18 Japanese Bamboo Art: The Abbey Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
2019 Grand Prize, The 39th Pola Traditional Culture Award
2019-20 Japanese Bamboo Art from New York: The Abbey Collection. Gifts to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oita Prefectural Art Museum; The National Museum of Modern Art; Tokyo Crafts Gallery; The Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka, Japan
2023 Designated a Living National Treasure in Bamboo Crafts
Public Collections
The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan
The Agency for Cultural Affairs in Japan
The Japan Foundation, Japan
MOA Museum of Art, Atami, Japan
The Hiratsuka Museum of Art, Hiratsuka, Japan
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, USA
Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, USA
Fujitsuka Shosei’s Bamboo Craft – A New Tradition
Moroyama Masanori (Craft Art Historian, Former Chief Curator at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo)
In 1999, Lloyd E. Cotsen of Los Angeles, held an exhibition, Bamboo Masterworks, in New York, with carefully selected masterpieces of bamboo flower baskets from his vast collection of Japanese bamboo works. This exhibition then toured various American cities to great acclaim and triggered a significant interest in bamboo craft, with an accompanying enthusiasm for collecting that spread from within the USA to Europe. While Japan was still astonished by this surge in appreciation, the recognition of bamboo craft as an art form rapidly gained international acceptance.
Following this, Mr Cotsen established the Cotsen Bamboo Prize to encourage emerging bamboo artists, holding the competition annually. It was Fujitsuka Shosei who won the runner-up prize at its second iteration in 2002. This achievement, along with further opportunities to showcase his work in the USA and other countries abroad, may have led him to develop a confidence in his own creative pursuits.
The Evolution of Japanese Bamboo Craft
Japanese bamboo craftsmanship traditionally involves preparing round bamboo stems or splitting them into sections to make round or thin flat strips, which are then woven into various forms to create everyday household objects. From the mid-Meiji period onward, basket makers with exceptional skills (kagoshi) began using innovative techniques to produce artistic bamboo works for aesthetic appreciation, passing down their expertise through generations into the modern era.
Artists such as Iizuka Rokansai, Shono Shounsai and Tanabe Chikuunsai II revolutionized bamboo art by integrating a modern sense of self, highlighting the natural beauty and special characteristics of bamboo and developing unique weaving and structural techniques that transformed bamboo craft into contemporary art.
Artists who have been designated as Living National Treasures work to preserve the techniques and artistry of Japan’s finest traditional crafts. Thanks to them, the Japan Traditional Kogei Exhibition has been held continuously to the present day. Following in the footsteps of Living National Treasures such as Shono Shounsai and Iizuka Shokansai, many artists have set out to create new traditions suited to the times, exercising modern sensibilities and distinctive methods.
Fujitsuka’s rise as a leading contemporary bamboo artist was achieved through his mastery of openwork twill plaiting (sukashi ajiro ami) and his unique colour transformation techniques (sai-henka), which earned him awards at the Japan Traditional Kogei Exhibition. In 2023, he was officially designated as a Living National Treasure in Bamboo Craft.
The Artistry of Fujitsuka Shosei
Fujitsuka’s work, Jomon Flower Basket (2011, the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo), with its openwork ajiro plaiting, was inspired by flame-shaped pottery from the Jomon period. This exquisitely woven flower basket features an outward-flaring rim reminiscent of morning glory flowers. The bulging body, plaited in ajiro style with thin, fine, black-dyed bamboo strips, is interspersed with bright red strips that evoke the flickering movement of flames bursting forth and crossing in arcs. While ajiro plaiting is one of the most basic traditional techniques, Fujitsuka introduced deliberate gaps in the weave to create openwork, meticulously adjusting them to produce a rich fullness. This required both the artist’s creativity and structural mastery and revealed his aesthetic sensibility.
Hoshifuruyoruni (Falling Stars) Flower Basket (2022), also employs openwork ajiro plaiting, creating a gently spreading bowl shape that undulates in three directions at the rim. It vividly evokes purple-lit shooting stars streaking across the celestial nebulae. The sharp contrast of black and purple bamboo strands exemplifies purity and displays Fujitsuka’s refined design sensibility.
Fujitsuka’s Colour-Shifting Technique
Traditionally, bamboo craftsmen primarily utilize natural white bamboo, smoked bamboo (susutake) and antiqued or lacquered finishes. Sometimes they dye bamboo strips black or brown to enhance its natural beauty. However, Fujitsuka developed a ground-breaking sai-henka (colour transformation) technique. It involves splitting round bamboo stems into thin square strips, dyeing them black, and then beveling them into isosceles triangles. The two diagonal faces are dyed in different colours — black, purple or brown — and arranged in many fine lines to form belt-like or geometric shapes, or irregularly shaped sculptures. He also invented an original technique to reconstruct these sculptures from the initially conceived form, into the three dimensional structure of a flower basket. By changing the viewing angle, the glossy colours of black and purple produce an optical illusion: gradations or dramatic changes of colour.
His award-winning work at the 2009 Japan Traditional Kogei Exhibition, Amanogawa (Milky Way) Flower Basket, exemplifies this technique. This oval, boat-shaped flower basket with both ends raised, features an elegant interplay of deep purple and shadowy black. The colour transformation of elegant purple and shadowy black might appear fantastical, but it reflects the mysterious transformations of vivid light radiating in the celestial nebula, shifting from purple to black or black to purple as the viewpoint changes.
Tide 19 (2019) displays a gradation from bright brown to darkness, reflecting ocean waves under moonlight. Similarly, Shifting Colour Offering Tray 21 (2021) creates a striking yellow and black inversion effect in the bottom interior of the basket.
In addition, Chikusei-eno-dokei (Longing for Green Bamboo) (2022) consists of geometric surfaces of triangles and wedge shapes formed by connecting bamboo strips dyed in two colours — black and green — reflecting the freshness of green bamboo. These surfaces are divided and assembled in two tiers, left and right or diagonally up and down, creating a diamond-shaped boat-form basket. The black and vivid green are emphasized, intuitively suggesting the beauty of bamboo, but Fujitsuka’s creativity also evokes the spectrum of shining green light colouring the celestial nebulae within the constructed form.
A New Aesthetic in Contemporary Bamboo Art
Fujitsuka Shosei, true to his own vision, has repeatedly portrayed the dramatic galactic spirals and undulating nebulae unfolding in the profundity of the universe — his unique source of beauty, along with the unfurling of flowers and swirling tides. Furthermore, in both his openwork ajiro plaited works, which elegantly harmonize black and brown and in his colour-transforming forms coordinating black with purple or green, Fujitsuka is consciously expanding the tradition of modern bamboo art, capturing a new sense of beauty that transcends nature — to create what could be called a contemporary romantic form.
View Bamboo masterworks by Fujitsuka Shosei