Myanmar Lacquer

The centre of lacquer ware manufacture is Bagan in upper Myanmar.

It is a cottage industry and in the village of Myinkaba alone, some 600 households produce lacquer ware.

Visitors are welcome to watch the process, a skill passed down from generation to generation. golden Cuckoo Lacquer ware in Myinkaba and Ma Moe Moe Family Lacquer ware in Ywar Thit Quarter, New Bagan, have English-speaking proprietors who are willing to demonstrate the processes step by step.

LACQUERBOXES                 more       LACQUER ITEMS

The process begins with the making of a bamboo frame for the lacquer ware item, a bowl for example. For objects of the highest quality, fine horsehair, taken from the tail, is woven around the frame.

You can tell if horsehair is used by pressing the sides of the bowl together — they should touch.

Lower quality bowls are made completely of bamboo wicker woven around the frame and are very stiff as a result.

Bamboo wicker or horsehair are traditional materials employed for lacquer- ware products. Nowadays, cheaper and more durable wood — mainly teak or mango plywood — is sometimes used to make bases for objects that are not round in shape, trays, boxes, treasure chests, screens, tables and chairs for example.

After the frame is made and bamboo wicker or horsehair has been woven around it, the first coating of lacquer is applied. The lacquer paint used is black and it comes from a resin of a particular tree found around Inle Lake in eastern Myanmar.

The lacquer paint is applied by hand which makes an even coating. The object is then left to dry for a week in an underground cellar; drying in the sun in the early stages causes pockmarks.

The object is then taken out for a second coating of lacquer. It is left to dry for yet another week in the cellar. The next stage involves covering the object with a paste made from a mixture of pulverized buffalo bone, teak sawdust and lacquer to fill up any nooks or crevices.

It is left to dry for a week. The object is then polished with pumice stone to remove rough surfaces. Lacquer paint is again applied and the object put aside to dry.

After another week, the object is polished again, both on the inside and outside, using a mixture of clay and stone. The polishing is done three times before the object is stored underground for one month. Then a long process of painting and drying begins.

First, the inside of the object is painted with lacquer and left to dry for a week; then the outside is painted and the object is again put aside for drying.

At that stage the object is polished again with water and stone, dried in the sun for two hours, another coat of lacquer is applied and the object is dried underground for a week.

For the next seven weeks, a layer of lacquer is applied at one-week intervals. The result is a shining lacquer product made even glossier by careful polishing with a buffalo chamois soaked in sesame oil. At this stage, the desired colour or colours and designs are worked onto the object. Usually traditional designs are etched onto the surface by very fine instruments.

Then one color is applied, the lacquerware is left to dry for a week, it is polished with rice husks, washed with water and painted with acacia glue to fix the colour.

If another colour is required, more details are etched and coated with the second colour, left to dry for a week, washed and then fixed with acacia glue again. More etchings are made and a third color is added and this time, the object is left to dry for a month. Later, it is polished first with teakwood ash and water and then with a piece of cotton cloth. It is washed and dried again for ten minutes in the sun and finally polished with a powder made from pulverized petrified wood. That’s not all. The object is painted once more on the

inside with red lacquer, left to dry for one week and is finally ready for sale.

It takes five months to produce lacquer cups, seven months to make betel boxes and at least a year to produce tables and chairs. But the final result is without a doubt, a thing of beauty and a fine testimony to Myanmar craftsmanship.

All about Japanese lacquer and exquisite sprinkled pictures 

Before I describe these unique and beautiful works of lacquer art, exclusively Japanese, I feel that you need to know more about Lacquer, the extraordinary medium that was used. Only then will you fully appreciate these brilliant creations.
For readers who are unfamiliar with old Japanese Lacquer, I suspect you will be thinking of the typical modern Lacquer trays and bowls that are mass-produced. These items are very decorative, but completely fail to compare with the magnificent earlier hand made works.

From China to Japan Lacquer is really the sap from a tree known as `Rhus Vernicifera'. The Chinese were the first to discover and use it, at least a century before Christ, when it was used as a paint, and more often as a preservative. It was a very effective preservative, as many pieces still exist from as far back as the Han period 206BC, when Lacquer was very popular and in extensive use.

The earliest known Japanese Lacquer dates back to about the 7th Century, but it was not until the 14th and 15th century that the Japanese Lacquer works became so much more decorative. By then they had refined and created exceptional techniques, far finer and more beautiful than the Chinese lacquer that they had simply originally copied.
 
The Chinese had used shades of black, brown, yellow, green, and mostly red or cinnabar Lacquer. They mainly favoured deep carving of the Lacquer, to form the decoration, and produced some outstanding work.

They often applied the colors in layers to the lacquerware object, so that once carved, these colors would be revealed. One particular technique is known as `Guri' Lacquer: the colors mostly red and black were built up in layers, and then a geometric or symmetrical pattern would be carved with a deep `V' shaped cut, so that all these alternating layers would be revealed within the cuts. The Chinese also painted, incised and inlaid Lacquer with iridescent pieces of shell, but these works were treasured by the Japanese often more so, than by the Chinese.

To begin with all these methods were copied, but by about the 15th century the Japanese had become, justifiably, the unrivalled masters of the art! Lacquer was, quite rightly, highly valued for its lasting qualities and strength. A very high gloss could be achieved, proving impervious to alcohol, acids and hot liquids. It would also have appealed to the Zen Buddhism ideals of `Yin and Yang', as Lacquer appears to be so delicately beautiful and light in weight. Yet, it is hard, impermeable and enduring.

The preparation is a very difficult medium to work with, uncompromising, sticky, and time consuming. It had to be strained to remove any impurities, and gently heated to thicken, and evaporate any moisture content. All the time it had to be kept in a dust free environment, and added to these difficulties, in its liquid form it gives off a poisonous gas! Strangely, it requires a damp humid atmosphere for it to harden.

Lacquer  had to be applied in very thin layers, otherwise it runs, and if too thick, will not harden at all but will just form a skin. After each layer had hardened, all the time in a dust free area, it was carefully rubbed down before another layer would be added. An average piece consisted of a minimum of 30 layers, in order that there would not be a trace of the wood base, or on larger pieces the hemp cloth applied in the early layers, to help strengthen the wood. The Lacquer Artist would have taken over, only at this stage, to create the decoration by the addition of yet even more layers.

The number of colors possible, due to chemical reactions with pigments and the composition of Lacquer were limited. So Lacquer artists were still restricted and blue was a very rare color.

It was the Japanese that developed the idea and the techniques of adding gold and silver to liven up the decoration. Real gold and silver metals were used in the form of foil, flakes, metal particles of various grades, as well as powders. All of these precious metals were brilliantly used to great advantage, particularly in the late 18th and early 19th century.

The sprinkling of gold or silver metal particles had been used before and over a very long period, to brighten up the interiors. Even very early Lacquer works have `Nashiji' inside. This is where fine particles of gold have simply been sprinkled in to the Lacquer. Some were scattered unevenly, producing cloud effects, whilst others varied in the density. However no pictures were formed.

Various shades of black lacquer were created, by charcoal mixed with different quantities of silver powder, so that they could even simulate painted brush strokes. These powders were mainly used for black pictures on a gold background, that one would never imagine were created by sprinkling techniques. What is also quite remarkable, is the very fine degree of control in shading that they were able to achieve. This meant that far more sophisticated pictures could be created, than had ever been seen before.

There are three types of sprinkled picture techniques in all and Togadashi, already described, is my favourite! Another is `Hiramakie', which is where quite a thickly sprinkled gold powder is used, and the lacquer is raised just a little above the background. As usual the surface is polished and burnished, before the final clear layers, and has a very rich appearance. Lastly, there is `Takamakie', which is again similar to Hiramakie, only it is in much higher relief. This thickness was achieved by building up and modelling the areas required in relief, with a combination of Lacquer and charcoal, before applying the gold powder layers.

Highlights of pure gold many Lacquer artists made use of a combination of these techniques in a piece of work. Just to further enrich these pictures, finely shaped tiny pieces of pure gold, so small that it is hard to imagine how they were handled, are individually applied near the final surface to create highlights. Frequently these are exactly matched shapes, tiny squares or diamond pieces that are all so amazingly very accurately placed. The combination of gold and lacquer is still very popular in Myanmar, just look at pictures above, the lacquer elephant is covered with pure gold.

Togadashi Boxes, one of our favorite examples of this type of work in this collection is a fine Box that appears as two overlapping boxes. One shows the figure of the sword smith forging the sword `Little Fox', assisted by the Fox Spirit in the guise of a woman; the other has an overall design of a mass of gold and colored flowers.

Looking closely at the gold centers of the flowers one can see how these consist of a number of very tiny shaped flakes of gold; each flake has been carefully placed by hand. It also has a marvelous fitted tray just in gold Togadashi of three foxes running in a landscape with a really dream like quality. The border of the tray is decorated in `Gyobu', which is where each individual flake of gold has also been positioned by hand, rather than sprinkled.

Another wonderful Box that is purely, fine Togadashi, depicts a busy street market scene, and what more can I say, other than it is an outstanding piece of work!

Neither of these boxes is signed, but they are nevertheless, of the finest quality. To see the photographs please use the link at the end of this article. These wonderful lacquer works feature on Japanese inro too (the subject of another article).
Modern works A word of warning when buying lacquer, it is important that the condition is both good and original. As there are now some cleverly repaired pieces on the market, expert advice should always be obtained.
Fine Lacquer is made even today, and there are certain living traditional Lacquer artists who are held in very high esteem in Japan. So much so, that some have been designated as `Living National Treasures', and their contemporary hand made Lacquer work is in high demand and extremely expensive.

I have seen an example, at a Lacquer study weekend held at the V & A museum. A remarkable modern box that combined thick clear Perspex with black Lacquer in a geometric design that really was very dramatic. Personally I still prefer the earlier works and for the cost of this modern box a very good collection could be formed!
About the Author John Cohen
The author has been a very keen collector for many years creating 'The Cohen collection'.