When the Metaphor Learns to Hold — Nara, 2027

For a long time, kintsugi has lived in my work as a metaphor.

A crack does not have to be erased. A wound does not have to pretend it never happened. A broken thing can keep its history and still continue.

This way of seeing entered the books, the gallery, the objects, the language around SHI. Gold became a sign of continuity. The seam became a sentence.

But every metaphor has a moment when it must answer to matter.

From 17 April to 14 May 2027, I will spend four weeks at Toma House AIR in Nara, Japan, studying traditional urushi-based kintsugi and maki-e as part of The Art of Repair — Kintsugi Between Japan and Ukraine.

For me, this is not a decorative chapter in the story. It is a deliberate deepening of the craft — a movement from understanding kintsugi as an idea toward understanding what it asks of the hand.

Until now, kintsugi has often been a language through which I thought about fragility, repair, memory and presence. In Nara, that language becomes physical.

Lacquer has viscosity. Powder has weight. A surface resists. Humidity matters. A hand trembles. Waiting matters.

The seam is no longer only an idea. It is something that either holds — or does not.

That difference is everything.

Japanese aesthetics is often exported as a collection of beautiful words: wabi-sabi, ma, impermanence, emptiness. The words travel easily. Practice is less obedient.

A craft refuses the shortcut.

Urushi does not care whether the metaphor is elegant. It asks whether the surface was prepared properly. Whether the layer was thin enough. Whether enough time was given. Whether the hand understood when to continue — and when to stop.

This is what attracts me to the Japanese relation with material: restraint without poverty, asymmetry without apology, age without disguise, empty space that is not empty at all. The object is not forced back into an imaginary first day of its life. Time remains visible.

Perhaps that is why kintsugi matters so much to me.

It does not make brokenness romantic. It makes repair accountable.

There is a strange beauty in the fact that a philosophy of accepting the fracture eventually demands sanding, mixing, curing, repeating. An idea about imperfection must finally meet dust, pressure, temperature, patience.

The metaphor becomes physics.

And this is where skill begins to matter more than language.

The Nara residency is, for me, a next level of practice: not a declaration of arrival, but a refinement. A chance to make the hand more exact, the eye more demanding, the gesture less approximate. To understand not only why a golden seam moves me, but what makes that seam structurally true.

Perhaps mastery, in its most useful sense, is not the right to say “I know.”

It is the ability to notice more. To see where the seam is weak. To understand why. To return to the work.

Nara will be four weeks inside that precision.

A period in which the concept becomes touch, the symbol becomes lacquer, and the gold line has to earn its place in the object.

That feels important now because Kintsugi Gallery was never meant to be only about the romance of brokenness. Repair without craft is only a story. Repair with craft becomes responsibility.

So the next movement is simple: less explanation, more material; less symbol, more hand; less certainty, more attention.

17 April — 14 May 2027. Nara, Japan.

The metaphor goes to learn how to hold.

→ Read about the forthcoming study in Nara

— Denys Rzhavskyi

Image: Bowl, 19th century, unknown artist, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Gold-repaired cracks (kintsugi). Public domain. Wikimedia Commons.jpg).