Hozan Zangana

KAMI
Urushi does not forgive impatience. Each layer must dry for days, sometimes weeks, before the next can be applied. Rush it and the surface fails. This is not a material that accommodates the pace of contemporary design, and that tension is precisely where Kami begins.

The project started as an invitation from Akita Prefecture, but it became something harder to categorize: a genuine negotiation between a Kurdish-Iraqi design sensibility, the technical world of Dutch lacquer master Dave van Gompel, who trained in Japan, and the practice of Japanese artist Mamiko Masumura. These are not perspectives that dissolve easily into one another. The work carries that friction.

Each piece is built through accumulation. Black lacquer is mixed with tofu-derived proteins until it reaches the consistency of texture paint, then hand-combed into a pattern of raised lines across the surface. Those lines are buried under layers of raw lacquer and finely ground clay. Then the whole surface is polished back, slowly, until the lines reappear from underneath. The technique, sabitogidashi seigahanuri, was developed by the collaborating artisans and draws on methods originally used to decorate Japanese sword scabbards. It arrives at something that has no prior name.

Rooted, the central work, brings together the silhouette of the Faranji vest from the Hawraman region of Kurdistan and the structural logic of Ikebana. Not as metaphor, not as cultural tourism. Two ways of orienting the body in the world, held together without resolution.

What Kami refuses is the idea that a threatened craft needs to be protected from change. Transformation is not a risk to tradition, but the only condition under which it survives.

WITH THE SUPPORT OF :
URUSHI ATELIER
NETHERLANDS
MAMIKO MASUMURA
AKANE YAMADA
TAMAKI MATSUDA
NILOUFAR ASHTIANI
LANA ZANGANA
DAVE VAN GOMPEL
PATRICK PEETERS
ERIK & PETRA HESMERG
MARC PREVOT
THE CREATIVE INDUSTRIES
FUND NL