Itchiku Kubota

Itchiku Kubota (1917-2003) was a Japanese textile artist who was most famous for reviving and modernizing a lost late-15th- to early-16th-century textile-dyeing and decorating technique called tsujigahana (literally, flowers at the crossroads).

Kubota left school at age 14 to become the apprentice of Kobayashi Kiyoshi, a Tokyo kimono artist who specialized in hand-painted yuzen (a paste-resist-dyeing technique). Kubota also studied other techniques for decorating fabrics, as well as Japanese-style landscape painting and portraiture. At the age of 20, he first saw a fragment of a textile in the tsujigahana style at the Tokyo National Museum, and decided to devote his life to recreating it. Because no instructions survive that explain how to reproduce the complex decorative techniques seen in tsujigahana, and because the silk fabric necessary for its successful production (nerinuki) is no longer woven, Kubota was forced to experiment on his own for decades.

In 1962, Kubota decided that there too many technical problems surrounding his mission to recreate traditional tsujigahana. He would instead develop his own form of tsujigahana, called "Itchiku Tsujigahana," substituting a contemporary silk crepe fabric (chirimen) for nerinuki and synthetic dyes for natural colors. In 1977, when Kubota was 60 years old, he displayed his decorated kimono for the first time in an exhibition in Tokyo.

Kubota's grand scheme was a series of kimono, called Symphony of Light, that would depict the "grandeur of the universe." At the time of his death, he had completed 40 of his projected 80 kimono in the series. Kubota's unique vision for this series involved a decorative landscape scheme that continued across every kimono, resulting in a panorama.

Kubota's sons continue their father's work at the artist's studio, Itchiku Kobo, in Tokyo.

Exhibitions

Kubota's work can be seen year-round at the Itchiku Kubota Art Museum in Yamanashi, Japan.

2008-2009: The San Diego Museum of Art will be presenting a rare American exhibition of Kubota's kimono in Kimono as Art: The Landscapes of Itchiku Kubota, from November 1, 2008-January 4, 2009. The exhibition travels to the Canton Museum of Art in Canton, Ohio (February 8-April 26, 2009).

External links

• Kimono as Art: The Landscapes of Itchiku Kubota (site created for the 2008-2009 Kubota exhibition)
• Itchiku Kubota Art Museum (Japanese)
• Canadian museum of civilization