Koichiro Kimura, who was born in 1963 in Sendai, Miyagi prefecture, inherited the 400-year-old lacquer shop. He is tall, stylish and, once aspired to be a fashion designer, possessed a keen expressiveness that upended the notion of craftsmanship. In order to seek the cooperation with Kimura, the top figures of Nestle, Masson, GUCCI and other world brands successively came to Japan. The key word, Japan, and Kimura’s artistry and originality, which transcend craft, have attracted the world’s elites.
Kimura is also good at using industrial materials far removed from paint, “my work is cheap but cool,” he says. The exhibition hall in Omotesando, Tokyo, is a non-everyday world covered by 4,000 snow-white pyramidal melamine resin parts. The work has been selected by Wallpaper as the world’s store designer, won several awards in Europe and has been included in Japanese junior school art textbooks. Through technical exchanges with various enterprises, the new material MIYAVIE, woven with silk polyethylene resin network structure, has excellent elasticity and comfort, excellent ventilation and water permeability. Sofas and lamps made by MIYAVIE are loved by people from the nursing site to the luxury space. Kimura’s high-end tableware and decorations also received high marks. The glass is shaped by cutting the turbine of an airplane, and the inside is cut by hand of famous craftmen. The highest technology combined with traditional lacquer techniques made the product a popular Japanese gift to foreign guests, and 500 pairs of 500,000 Yen cups were sold well.
The novel sense has a traditional DNA, uninhibited and elegant. Kimura inherited a sharp sense of beauty before Wabi-sabi aesthetic consciousness from the family business inherited from the Momoyama era to the present. Kimura says his work is meaningless if it is considered traditional, must be fresh.” There is no sexy thing without sexy feeling”, the handicraft people in his workshop are not only immersed in production, but also like the Edo era love to have fun and live a way of working full of human interest. Kimura started doing Yoga at 4am every day, grew vegetables on weekends, is interested in everything, full of energy and lived a fresh life. Inheriting the tradition, while destroying it, and create the future of the tradition with new ideas and techniques.