Urushi trees and Ostranenie
In traditional lacquer harvesting, urushi-kaki (漆掻き) or lacquer tappers collect the raw material for “urushi” (うるし) from the urushi (ウルシ) trees from early summer to fall.
—In June, the lacquer tappers put their hands together to pray to the mountain gods for a safe and good harvest and cut notches in the trunks of the urushi trees.
At the beginning of the summer, only a little sap comes out when the cuts are made. However, after repeated scores, large amounts of sap overflow from the trees by the height of the summer. The urushi trees are deciduous and their leaves turn red in the fall. Eventually, at the end of the extraction season, the dead trees are cut down.
According to the traditional “seshime” method, cut tree branches were collected and lacquer was extracted from the tips of these branches as well. This was more of a side job during the off-season in the winter and barely done each year due to the small amount it yielded. In recent years, it is rare to see “seshime” when the lacquer industry has been economically slower. The lacquer obtained from the seshime process is called “seshime urushi,“ (seshime lacquer) which has a high viscosity and is treated separately as a material.
The urushi tree is cut down for its sap, but its roots are not dead. Sprouts [*1] grow and regenerate in the next year. It will take more than ten years for the tree to grow into a mature form from which urushi can be harvested again.
[*1] Young shoots that grow from tree stumps and roots
Today, with the collapse of our consumerist society on the horizon and the realization that our planet’s resources are not sustainable at our current rate, one theory suggests that we must slow down our consumption rate to what it was in the 1970s. In other words, in our modern age, we are increasingly looking toward our past lifestyles for clues to our future social structures.
In traditional lacquer harvesting, every last drop of sap is extracted from an urushi tree, but the tree itself is not destroyed until the very end so that it can regenerate again later. This lifestyle that is seemingly in close contact with the life force of the forest may contain some clues for the future of our society.
◉ Artwork «Urushi Lacquered Urushi Wood»
At the end of the lacquering season, the branches of the urushi tree are discarded after the sap has been wrung out. These branches were then coated with "urushi” as processed goods and made into a work of art titled, «Urushi Lacquered Urushi Branches» (2021).
Additionally, as an extension of this work, «Urushi Lacquered Urushi Wood» designed to be completed through a 10-year process is currently being produced. Since 2021, the Urushi Project team has been filming lacquer tapping in Fukuchiyama City in Kyoto Prefecture. After being filmed and cut down at the end of the 2021 season, the piece “Urushi Lacquered Urushi Wood” aims to preserve the tree as a work of art.
Urushi (sap) on urushi (tree). At first glance, it seems very meaningless.
«Urushi Lacquered Urushi Branches»（2021）production：Ryuji Onari © URUSHI PROJECT
Perhaps because there is a general perception that "urushi promotes (an object’s) beauty and refines its luxury”.
One of art’s functions is to transform the "familiar" into the "unfamiliar". Words become routine with continued use, their meaning eventually slipping away and becoming "auto-mechanized". The ancient Greeks called this "Doxa". When the thought (or assumption) that "urushi promotes beauty and elevates luxury" is entrenched, the image of the material becomes "doxa-ized". Even before we see the real thing, we have unconsciously (and unknowingly) created the idea that "lacquer = beauty (or coated in something beautiful)".
On the other hand, the concept of "ostranenie" (defamiliarization) established by Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky and others in the Russian avant-garde, refers to the re-normalization and de-normalization of things.
«Urushi Lacquered Urushi Wood» is about using urushi as paint, which is an expensive material refined by human hands, on "urushi wood" from which "urushi lacquer" as a raw material is extracted and then discarded. What is the meaning of using such high-grade paint for something meaningless, something that is not worth decorating? Moreover, what if that "paint" is raw material extracted from another raw material? The emphasis lies in the significance of harvesting urushi from urushi trees. Why do people take the trouble to extract “urushi” from “urushi”?
Of course, the amount of lacquer needed to completely preserve an urushi tree with “urushi" is far from sufficient. This is similar to our consumer lifestyle in the capitalist economy, where the amount of energy consumed by an individual does not necessarily match the amount of energy produced by them.
«Urushi Lacquered Urushi Wood» functions as an icon of the Urushi Project, contemplating the changes of values in a materialistic society with questions and contradictions about oneself—inquiries that swirl endlessly in an urushi-colored black hole.
