Today my only class was the Practicum in Japanese Art. I guess we're still in the orientation phase, before we break off into studio groups, because we were set to meet up at Ueno station for part one of our tour of Geidai (東京藝術大学), a well-known art college in Tokyo, and our instructor's alma mater. I went a bit early to meet up with Hans, who is also in the class, to have some lunch. Unable to find a suitable cheap restaurant, we settled on conbini food and went to the rendevous point in front of the station. About 20 minutes or so after we were supposed to leave, the group made its way through the park past some... interesting street performers, to the Geidai campus.
The school is divided by a street into two parts: fine arts and performing arts. Today we would visit the fine arts half of the school, and see some of the disciplines we would be learning for the next several weeks. We visited the metalworking studios, including hammering, welding, and casting, then we moved on to ceramics and urushi (traditional Japanese enamelware). Urushi is especially interesting and at the same time, seems to be mind-numbingly boring. Many many layers of noxious enamel applied to the same piece of wood for several weeks sure sounds fun, but seeing as it's the most expensive studio class to take, I don't think I could handle all that fun.The last stop on the tour was weaving, where we saw a few students working on concepts for woven work. This would not be one of the studio classes offered to us, but it was interesting nonetheless.
Once the tour ended, we all set off in different directions. As luck would have it, there was a "good design award" show being held at one of the buildings on campus, so I went to check it out. It seemed to be mostly consumer design from the past 50 years or so, and there were some weird things considered for the award, such as the original playstation. Upstairs were the items from the past decade or so, along with a crowd of people listening to a couple of older gentlemen give a speech. The speech being in Japanese, and the acoustics bouncing the speech off the walls made it impossible for me to understand anything that was being said, so after a respectful period of looking like I was paying attention, I headed again for the door.
On the way back to the station, I looked through the entrance to a restaurant and took this photo. I just think it looks cool, so live with it.
1 comment:
Urushi might seem boring at first, but actually it makes you a nervous wreck while making it. It is EXTREMELY difficult to do, but when you end up with a $300 or so plate decorated in gold afterwards it can be pretty nice.
You start with the plate that is already done and do only the decorating part. You don't have time for putting the enamel on. That is the "easy" part anyway."
Depends what you choose to do. There is no bad choice really. That is the best class I had in Japan hands down. Of course it is also the most expensive class I ever had.
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