From Japan to Holland

Arita is an idyllic town surrounded by mountains and forests in Saga prefecture, Japan. It is where, exactly 400 years ago, they manufactured the country’s first porcelains, much admired in Europe where they were imported by the Dutch East India Company.

This success flagged from the second half of the last century to the present day, with production falling to one sixth of that in its glory days. The high manufacturing standards remained but this production pole of excellence needed revitalising to stop more producers vanishing, with the ensuing threat to skills passed down for centuries. That is why Saga prefecture asked Dutch duo Scholten & Baijings (who had already designed for Arita) and Japan’s Teruhiro Yanagihara to enlist a team of designers to create a new collection employing traditional techniques but with a contemporary slant.

The 2016 project is the interesting and substantial response developed over two years and presented at Design Week in the Brera District. More than 300 pieces manufactured by ten Arita producers to designs by 16 designers from Europe, America and Japan: Ingegerd Räman, Studio Wieki Somers, BIG-GAME, Christien Meindertsma, Teruhiro Yanagihara, Kirstie van Noort, Tomás Alonso, Christian Haas, Shigeki Fujishiro, Kueng Caputo, Pauline Deltour, Stefan Diez, Scholten & Baijings, Saskia Diez, Leon Ransmeier and TAF.

After Milan, they will move to the Asian Pavilion of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam for an exhibition combining the new pieces with similar ones from the museum’s collection in “Arita Porcelain Today”, from 22 April to 9 October.

12 – 17 April 2016

Arita

via delle Erbe 2
Milano