This latticework landscape is currently on display in Kensington High Street at the Japan House exhibition The Craft of Carpentry: Drawing Life from Japan’s Forests. It was made five years ago by Sakae Tategu Kogei, the firm founded by Eiichi Yokota, a master of kumiko craft. 'The origins of kumiko likely date back to the Kamakura period (1185–1333), with techniques passed down through generations. The central process involves crafting thin, delicate pieces of wood and assembling them in various geometric patterns to form a seamless surface.' The different coloured woods include Japanese whitebark magnolia, Chinese pyramid juniper, lignitized Japanese castor aralia and Kiso hinoki cypress. The delicate shapes used to make the components of the landscape range from a basic triangle joint to the yae asa-no-ha (eight-layer hemp leaf) and dahlia patterns.
The fact that some of these wooden patterns are named after natural forms does not of course mean that they are designed to signify dahlias or hemp leaves. My photo above shows the dahlia pattern and you can see this used in the mountain landscape for the third-from-bottom slope on the left. There is an interesting semiotic effect here, where flower shapes are used not to imply anything about vegetation in the scene. Instead they suggest the complexity of light and shade or strength of shadow on a particular slope. This reminds me of a broader feature of Chinese and Japanese arts where the names for technical components often evoke specific natural effects, but could have been used freely. To paint a whirlpool you could use the brush stroke tan wo ts’un ('like eddies of a whirlpool'), but maybe it would be more interesting to deploy the luan yün ts’un ('like rolling billows of cloud').
We use kumiko coasters every day to put drinks and pans on but I don't remember seeing the technique used to create a landscape before. I would love to know more about the history of kumiko used in this way, but information online is scant. Simpler kumiko lattices (square and rectangles) are used on shoji screens which could themselves have landscapes painted onto them, although surely it is preferable to leave them blank. As Tanizaki said in praise of shadows: 'the light from the garden steals in but dimly through paper-paneled doors, and it is precisely this indirect light that makes for us the charm of a room.' The garden and landscape beyond can then be revealed by sliding the screen doors open.
