Tetsuya Okamura

Tetsuya Okamura is a lacquerer. He applies urushi coat after coat, twenty to forty times depending on the piece, and lets each pass dry in a humid chamber. The work is counted in months, never in days. Trained in Wajima in a workshop making boxes, he moved away from traditional decoration around 2008: his boxes now open onto nothing, or onto an inlaid cinnabar ground discovered by turning them over. He uses gold leaf sparingly, as punctuation. He lives and works in Kanazawa, burns his own polishing charcoal, and delegates no stage of the process. The gallery has represented him since 2018.