A century ago, the Japanese critic Sōetsu Yanagi, with the potters Shōji Hamada and Kawai Kanjirō, coined the term Mingei (“art of the people”), an elision of minshūteki kōgei (“ordinary people’s craft”). Mingei, in the vein of the British Arts and Crafts movement before it, was a response to rapid industrialization in Japan. Mingei argued for the recognition and continued production of functional, affordable handmade folk crafts, such as simple teacups and rice bowls, “used by ordinary people in their daily lives,” as Yanagi wrote in his 1933 essay “What is Folk Craft.”
Over the past century, the Mingei movement has endured and undergone waves of revival in popularity. Going by a recent flurry of books and exhibitions in Japan and abroad, its ideas appear to be in the air again today.
Mingei is “having a moment” right now, Manami Okazaki, the Tokyo-based journalist and curator whose book Japanese Mingei Folk Crafts is out this month with Tuttle Publishing, tells Observer. Okakazi attributes a broad sense of “fatigue: digital fatigue, and the fatigue of fast consumption” as contributing to the current spike in interest. Contemporary interest in craft and folk culture is a global trend, she says, “possibly fueled by Covid and the desire for a non-digitally mediated reality.” Handmade crafts offer tactile experiences. Okazaki adds that “when people talk about the appeal of Mingei, they often talk about the item having affective qualities such as the warmth of the wood [and use] words like ‘comforting’ and ‘calming.’”
In 1920s Japan, rapid industrialization was coupled with an onslaught of Western values and aesthetics that many feared threatened Japanese identity. Yanagi argued for a rejection of Euro-centric ideas of individualism, arguing that true, pure beauty was found in objects made, through constant repetition, by, as he wrote, creators who “are not famous artists but anonymous artisans.”
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It was in Korea, occupied by Japan from 1910-1945, that Yanagi laid the foundations of Mingei theory. He admired the smooth white porcelain jars of Joseon-era ceramics, the aesthetics of which he described as the “beauty of sorrow” due to the nation’s history of occupation. It’s a description that reveals how Mingei’s elevation of the aesthetics of purity intertwined with the politics of colonial Japan. In an essay published in “Mingei: Art Without Heroes,“ the catalog accompanying London’s William Morris Gallery’s exhibition of the same name, Dasom Sung, assistant curator of Korean Arts at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, describes Yanagi’s rather exoticized and paternalistic appreciation as “a Japanese form of Orientalism.” While he expressed “love and respect” for Korean people, Yanagi discouraged their resistance to colonial rule, Sung continues. Yanagi’s engagement with the crafts of occupied Korea was tacitly supported by the colonial government to placate Korean resistance and, whether intentional or not, it was “a means of reproducing Japanese colonial power,” she writes.
If there is a push and pull between two ideas here—Mingei as both a bulwark against and tool of cultural imperialism—that’s not ignored by the William Morris Gallery’s exhibition, which displays and contextualizes work from Korea, Hokkaido and Okinawa (all colonized by Japan) and is the U.K.’s largest-ever exhibition of Mingei. A robe made in the 19th Century using the bingata technique, a colorful form of stenciled resist-dyeing from Okinawa (then the Ryukyu Kingdom), is displayed next to a six-fold screen made around 1940 by Keisuke Serizawa, which uses the same bingata technique to depict a map of Okinawa’s main island surrounded by vignettes of its traditional life and crafts. An interpretive panel below tells us that Serizawa, whose map depicts “the magical, tropical atmosphere of a lost Mingei paradise,” argued for the beauty and value of Okinawan folk craft “in the face of increasing assimilation and loss of Indigenous culture.” But bingata was not a folk craft; robes like this one were worn exclusively by the Ryukyu royal family until Japan officially annexed the Kingdom and designated it Okinawa Prefecture in 1879. Given the movement’s misunderstandings of Indigenous culture, it’s little wonder that some Okinawans, as the adjacent panel tells us, criticized Mingei ideals, believing they “objectified” Okinawa “as an exotic curiosity.”
“Art Without Heroes,“ which is on view until September 22, makes an excellent case for the contemporary relevance of the ideas and critiques, from decolonization to sustainability, surrounding Mingei. “My interpretation definitely has a focus on these topics and their relevance today,” curator Róisín Ingelsby tells Observer. “Which is not to say that the issues aren’t there in the original movement, but [they] are the ones that feel most urgent to us.”
The exhibition’s breadth may come as a surprise to visitors who mistakenly believe that Mingei is “all about brown pots,” says Ingelsby who wanted to show “the sheer breadth of crafts and objects that have been considered Mingei.” The wide-ranging exhibition traces the development of Mingei, from the 19th-century objects that inspired it to its 21st-century iterations, and highlights its diversity in both form and scope. It encompasses carved Ainu prayer sticks; placid-faced wooden kokeshi dolls; patched-together cotton boro work clothes; and a blue glazed jar by Sardar Gurcharan Singh, founder of Delhi Blue Pottery. Iron kettles, earthy clay sake flasks and small Onta ware drinking cups (guinomi), which continue to be sold today at affordable prices, emphasize the utility of Mingei crafts, which were always meant to be used rather than displayed. “Mingei has always been a flexible definition,” says Inglesby. The exhibition aims to bring out “how it has been interpreted and the contradictions within interpretations.”
The exhibition’s subtitle, “Art Without Heroes,” which refers to the anonymity of Mingei makers, elicits some of those contradictions. Yanagi wrote that “folk artisans are not individual artists working on their own” and that they create “almost unconsciously.” From a 21st-century, particularly Western, perspective, this erasure of identity can be difficult to accept, Ingelsby writes in the exhibition’s accompanying catalog. Signing a work can be a political act, she writes, as “there is a difference between the anonymous maker and those who have been anonymised by political and social repression.”
While this central principle of anonymity is still important, Ingelsby says, there has always been resistance to it. “Even in the 20th Century, there were examples of craftspeople wanting to sign their work and therefore deliberately discounting the label ‘Mingei.’” She adds that “the son of Niwa Ryuhe, who made one of the gorgeous teapots in the show, was initially very uncomfortable with the pot being in a Mingei exhibition, as it is signed and therefore ‘not Mingei.’”
The Mingei pioneers’ rules are “fluid,” says Ozakaki, who does not consider anonymity a central principle. We might even consider Mingei’s current popularity a pushback against the anonymity of our contemporary, industrialized and globalized society. “People seek out the back story of Mingei,” says Ozakaki. “Compared to mass production, which is opaque and completely hidden from the consumer, Mingei production is human.” This is part of its appeal, she says. “Mingei, then and now, is very much related to travel: going to the source and seeing the way these crafts exist within context. People from across Japan will go on pilgrimages to certain kilns to see master potters, or to ateliers to see cloth being made from their favorite weaver.”
Her book acts as a guide to the world of Mingei across Japan, from pottery in the Ryukyu Islands in the south to toy horses from Tohoku in the north. As does Kentaro Hagihara’s 2020 Mingei: Masterpieces of Japanese Folkcraft (Japanese only but richly illustrated). Also in Japan, visitors can see a contemporary interpretation of Mingei at “Theaster Gates: Afro-Mingei,” which is on view at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum until September 1. The show’s title, “Afro-Mingei,” refers to Gates’ own conceptual framework for his pottery practice, which ties the idea of Mingei as a form of resistance to Westernization to the Black is Beautiful movement’s challenge to Eurocentric beauty standards.
That Mingei continues to inspire shows that the century-old movement has an enduring appeal. Indeed, Mingei may be more relevant than ever. That’s due to “the continued failure of our society to change many of the intractable problems that have been with us since the industrial revolution and seem to be getting worse at an alarming rate,” says Inglesby, listing economic inequality, exploitative labor practices, environmental damage, affordable access to good quality objects and loss of contact with handskills as examples of these challenges. “William Morris campaigned against these problems 150 years ago; Mingei picked up many of these ideas a century ago,” she says, “and yet we’re still grappling with how to deal with them.”