ISEE Practice Test 7

The Golden Seam

¹  When a favorite bowl cracks, most of us do one of two things. We throw

²it away, or we glue it back together and hope no one notices the line.

³Centuries ago, Japanese craftspeople developed a third option called

⁴kintsugi, which means "golden joinery." In kintsugi, broken pottery is

⁵rejoined with lacquer, a sticky sap from the lacquer tree, and the seams

⁶are then dusted with powdered gold. The repaired object does not hide

⁷its injury. Instead, a bright line runs exactly where the break once

⁸was.

⁹  The technique is slow. Each layer of lacquer must cure for days in a

¹⁰warm, humid space before the next can be applied, and a single bowl may

¹¹take weeks to finish. That patience is part of the point. A kintsugi

¹²repair cannot be rushed, and the mender must study every crack before

¹³deciding how the gold should travel across the surface.

¹⁴  Admirers often connect kintsugi to wabi-sabi, a Japanese way of seeing

¹⁵that finds beauty in things that are imperfect, aging, or incomplete.

¹⁶From this point of view, a mended tea bowl is not a damaged copy of the

¹⁷original. It is a new object with a history, and the gold seam is the

¹⁸record of that history. Some collectors have even prized repaired pieces

¹⁹above unbroken ones.

²⁰  In recent years, the word has drifted far from the workshop. Self-help

²¹books invoke kintsugi as a symbol of recovering from hardship, and

²²stores sell home kits that rely on quick-setting glue and gold-colored

²³powder. Some traditional craftspeople find this troubling. A kit that

²⁴finishes a bowl in an afternoon, they point out, skips the very patience

²⁵that gave the practice its meaning.

²⁶  Still, the popularity of the idea may tell us something worth hearing.

²⁷In a culture that often replaces what it could repair, kintsugi offers a

²⁸quiet argument: that the marks of use and mending are not flaws to be

²⁹erased, but part of what makes an object, or a life, worth keeping.