Kintsugi Samsara

Kintsugi Samsara is a large round carved wood wall piece that has been deliberately broken into sections and then put back together with gold-colored seams. The cracks aren't hidden or apologized for. They're the most beautiful thing about it — bright gold rivers running across the wood, showing exactly where it came apart and where it was made whole again.

The gold-seam idea is a real Japanese art called kintsugi (金継ぎ), meaning "golden joinery" — the art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, so the repair is celebrated instead of concealed [Kintsugi, Wikipedia]. The most-told origin story goes back to the late 15th century: the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa (1436–1490) sent a broken tea bowl to China for repair and got it back stapled together with ugly metal staples, which prompted Japanese craftsmen to find a more beautiful way to mend it [Traditional Kyoto]. Kintsugi is tied to the philosophy of wabi-sabi — finding beauty in imperfection and wear — and to the Zen idea of mushin, or acceptance of change [ConnollyCove]. A bowl mended with gold isn't "as good as new." It's considered better: richer, more honest, one of a kind.

The circle is where the Indian half comes in. Samsara is the Sanskrit word for the cycle of birth, death and rebirth at the center of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism; it literally means "continuous movement," "continuous flowing" or "wandering" [New World Encyclopedia]. It's the wheel of life — breaking and re-forming, over and over. Put the two ideas together and the piece says something plain and true: things fall apart, they get put back together, and the mending is where the beauty and the value are. The break is not the end of the story; it's the middle of it.