Memory On Cloth: Shibori Now [Hardcover]

Fragments of shibori-like textiles found in Africa date from as far back as 700 BCE. Purely Japanese textiles date from the Yayoi period (200 BCE-250 ACE). Yayoi people wove garments on portable looms. The making of cloth depended not so much on the mass of the wearer's body as on how the movement of the wearer's body will determine what the loom must do. In Yayoi times weavers used portable loom that could be easily set up by tying one set of warp ends around the waist and the other to a tree. The weaver's body width fixed the width of the fabric. That most Yayoi textiles were about twelve inches wide says much about the size of the Yayois.

Japan did not embrace clothing as an expression of social delineation until the Asuka period (552-645), an era when Chinese crafts, and customs were eagerly imported. Over the centuries, surface designs became steadily more complex as garment silhouettes became steadily more simple. These tendencies merged into the kimono and have stayed there ever since. With the xenophobic policies of the Tokugawa Shogunate, all things foreign were shunned. The Japanese turned inward to their own tastes and aesthetics.

By the Edo period (1600-1868), complex layerings of color, patterns, and resist dyes all contributed to a great culmination of textile design. Into the canons of design came surface complexity ranging from colors so saturated they dazzle the eye to so subtle they are almost indistinguishable. Japanese textile art embraced a dozen or more dyeing techniques, embroidery and appliqué, painted pictures, hammered gold and silver patterns, calligraphy. Out of these chirped an aviary of decor-plum blossoms, pine boughs, flowers on trellises, rice sheaves, snowflakes, paired shells, swallowtail butterflies, quince flowers, waves, interlocked squares, medallions of chrysanthemum and wisteria and gentian, cranes, lightning, hemp leaves, scrolls of peony, woven circles, basket work, fish scales, mountains, clouds, flowing water, waves, checkerboards, circles.

In the wrong hands such a tumultuous vocabulary would end in chaos. But from the great costumes of the Noh to the hundreds of treatises on kimono design to be found in Japanese bookstores and libraries today, there always existed in the Japanese garment imagination a more fundamental quality: drama. It is no surprise to find that the garment's greatest period of elaboration came after it was adopted as the principle costume by groups of itinerant entertainers who evolved into the most enduring of Japanese theatrical styles, the Noh.

The Memory on Cloth story begins after World War II. Before the War, textiles and garments were major engines of Japan's economy-the equivalent of transistor products and autos today. The quaint, consuming, painstaking art of shibori was nearly extinct by the 1960s. Modernity-craving Japanese put their old kimonos into the tansu and bought Missoni and Prada and The Gap. Shibori's spiritual home, in Arimatsu and Narumi on Honshu island, was ignored even by the railways, which built no sidings there. Too few fabric dyers were left to fill a boxcar with goods.

But valiant was the tenacity of the industry. Arimatsu-Narumi's response was to invent. When the market for kimonos dwindled, they made neckties. Even so, by 1972, one of Japan's oldest industries had dwindled to two elderly practitioners. Then along came people like Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada, one of so many artists who bootstrapped ancient crafts out of extinction by globalizing them in the same positive way that world fusion music has globalized innumerable melody forms. Shibori was turned around. Today it is an internationally recognized art form.

It also can be a vibrant modern art form. Memory on Cloth features work by artists from Africa, South America, Europe, India, Japan, China, Korea, the USA, and Australia. It encompasses fabric design, wearable art and fashion, and textile art or various sculptural forms. Described are works by more than seventy innovative designers, including Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, Jurgen Lehl, Jun'ichi Arai, Helene Soubeyran, Genevieve Dion, Asha Sarabhai, Junco Sato Pollack, Ana Lisa Hedstrom, Marian Clayden, and Carter Smith. Each artist shares details on the processes they have created, making this an invaluable source of inspiration for artists in fields outside of textile design.

Japan never made a distinction between craft and art. Indeed, even in the West that demarcation arose only over the last few hundred years as a manifestation of the post-Renaissance preoccupation with individuality. In Japan the unity of art and craft was not because Japanese textile makers shunned egocentrism, but because of their tendency to focus on process more than product. The Japanese Zen garden of raked stones is Exhibit A in contemplative surrender to process.

Like so many arts that globalization salvaged at the edge of extinction, shibori inspired a modern revival laden with legend and freighted with technique. The progress of Japanese textiles is stuttery, sitting in place one moment, leaping forward the next, the artists either appropriating or inventing as chance comes calling. The result is a continually evolving collaboration between past and future. Today's mingling of synthetic and natural fibers, organics and metals, hand and machine, are in keeping with the try-anything heritage of the country's garments.

Yoshiko Wada is an endearingly good writer: lucid, logical, tight, to the point. She teaches shibori aesthetics and techniques in her home city of Berkeley, California, and around the world. Thanks to her, shibori was transported to Africa and inspired a vibrant local industry in Mali and other Sahel countries. Of her it can truly be said that the word 'shibori' is now an international currency.