Conscious Choice: Masters of the Bamboo Weave

February 2003

Masters of the Bamboo Weave

by Jonn Salovaara

If bamboo baskets put you in mind of Pier One, think again. Think instead of Alexander Calder — if Calder had made his Federal Center Flamingo, the giant red-pink steel structure near Dearborn and Jackson, on a smaller scale in bamboo strips. The Japanese bamboo baskets from the collection of Lloyd Cotsen, at Chicago’s Field Museum, are sculpture, or three-dimensional optical art.

Many of the pieces have titles that, like Alexander Calder’s Federal Center Flamingo, suggest imitation of nature. For some of them, the resemblance is clear enough. There’s a basket that looks like a seashell, one called a drop of dew, and one that is shaped like an oversized gourd. One especially entrancing work recalls an ocean swell; another, maybe too ambitious, claims to be a tidal wave.

If the Japanese enjoy mimicking elements of nature in this unfamiliar bamboo medium, they also love the optical effects that spring from the weaving of split bamboo. Bennet Bronson, curator of Asian archaeology and ethnology at the Field Museum, points out that even when the nature titles appear to be afterthoughts, the shimmering effects of viewing fine lines of bamboo through other fine lines of bamboo retain their power. The Japanese love for texture, for asymmetry, and for the interplay between the formal and the wild also shimmer in many of these works.

All this did begin as basketry. A master of the tea ceremony in the 18th century ruled in favor of using bamboo baskets to hold flowers as decoration for the tea ceremony. Many of the earlier pieces in this exhibit, from the 19th and early 20th century, could clearly serve as a setting for ikebana, Japanese flower arranging. These baskets, influenced in some cases by Chinese forms, are more symmetrical than later works. But the intricacies of their woven rattan lines and their elaborate solutions for attaching handles, make these earlier pieces no less astounding, maybe even more astounding, than the later abstractions in bamboo.

The twenty-minute video playing midway through the exhibit hall suggests that the genius of one of Japan’s Living National Treasures was responsible for the transformation of basketry into sculpture and eye-bending optical art. Intense enough to figure in a serious Kurosawa film, Shôno Shôunsai, who died in 1974, ponders the strips of bamboo, tightening the weave, re-soaking the pieces, cutting the ends. His glasses enlarge his eyes to huge proportions. And the makers of the video used background music reminiscent of Stravinsky to further heighten the high-art aura of his work.

Shôunsai not only resembles a somewhat self-tortured novelist in his approach to his form, he insists on tramping through exactly the right bamboo forest at exactly the right time of year to find exactly the right towering bamboo to cut down. Oddly, the basket he produces at the end of the video, though beautiful, is much simpler and more like a basket than many of the baskets included in the exhibit.

Nonetheless, it was Shôunsai who in the late‘50s created "The Shimmering of Heated Air," a piece which, according to Bronson, sparked a national dialogue in Japan on the line between flower basket and non-basket. This work is included in the exhibit; it’s not too hard to see what the fuss was about, for it looks very little like a basket. It’s a complex geometrical form with thin pieces of bamboo lined up like strings on a harp.

The exhibit includes much good wall-information about the history of the basket form, and the 100 or so items displayed are the right amount. The pieces are organized by style — formal, semi-formal, informal — rather than date, and this may be a little unbalancing for visitors with a more linear approach to things. Yet, for an exhibit about a culture as different as Japan’s, for an exhibit that raises questions about the line between craft and art, workmanship and showmanship, a little confusion may be appropriate. The persistent tonk-tonkling of recorded bamboo wind chimes, periodically mixing with the video’s Stravinskyesque music, underscores the presiding sense of the foreign.

Jonn Salovaara is a freelance writer and landscape gardener. He teaches writing and literature at Columbia College in Chicago.

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