Precious Donation

The donated lacquer tea bowl is astonishing in its technically and aesthetically perfected form, which is modelled after the well-known Tenmoku ceramic bowls originating in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries more. The lacquer piece embodies the living transmission of traditional arts and craftsmanship in Japan, which today are facing increasingly precarious conditions. In particular, the well-known lacquer workshops of Wajima in Ishikawa Prefecture suffered a fundamentally severe blow through the devastating earthquake that occurred in early 2024, leaving around half of the workshops destroyed.

The donation to the museum is of special significance, in that it symbolically lays a cornerstone for the future collaboration and continued institutional cooperation and friendship between Cologne and Münster within the field of East Asian lacquer art.