Delving Deeper
about 61 months ago (04/18/2019)
Lot 1255 Rago’s Modern Design sale, September 23, 2018: Nikko cabinet designed by Shiro Kuramata, 1982. With an estimate of $5,000–$7,000, the piece sold for $11,250. Some reasons for the high price: JAPANESE IN MEMPHIS Shiro Kuramata grew up under the uncertain circumstances of Japan of the 1930s and ‘40s, but this precarity gave Kuramata and his contemporaries the opportunity to envision what they wanted of Japanese modern design. After training in woodcraft at Tokyo Municipal Polytechnic High School, Kuramata enrolled at the Kuwasawa Design School, graduating in 1956 and moving on to design for department stores. Creatively, Kuramata’s influences form a constellation of eclectic forces: Isamu Kenmochi, his instructor at Kuwasawa, who taught an approach to ancient Japanese traditions through modern materials and vocabulary; American sculptor Donald Judd, whose minimalist work enthralled Kuramata; Gutai, a Japanese performance group that embraced decay as a revelatory process into