Kintsugi or kinsukuroi, meaning “golden joinery” or “golden repair”, is the traditional Japanese art of adding a gold powder to the glue or resin used for repair. The mending method honors the history of the broken object, accentuating it rather than hiding it. It is an art form born from mottainai, the feeling of regret when something valuable has been wasted.
Kintsugi is traditionally practiced with pottery, but the concept can be applied to other items… including, perhaps, an aging basketball court.
Artist Victor Solomon recently renovated a south Los Angeles basketball court with fresh paint, new backboards and hoops, and the Kintsugi method to fill cracks in the asphalt. The project is titled Kintsugi Court.
In a statement to Hypebeast, he explains:
“With the heartbreaking beginning to 2020 and this weekend’s return of basketball – I’ve been thinking about the parallels between sport as a uniting platform to inspire healing and my ongoing experiments with the technique of Kintsugi that embellishes an object’s repair with gold to celebrate its healing as a formative part of the journey.”
Find more of Solomon’s exploration of basketball at LiterallyBalling.com.
Watch more videos about repairing things, including:
• Kintsugi & kintsukuroi: The art of pottery mending with gold
• Showzi Tsukamoto demonstrates the art of kintsugi
• New York City’s pothole repair team
• Wet Book Rescue: How to repair a wet, damaged book
• How art conservator Julian Baumgartner restores damaged paintings
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