Furosaki byobu or short, two-panel folding screen for tea ceremony with a modernist design of swallows flying over waves. Of hammered and inlaid iron, aluminum, bronze, silver and brass. Signed on the reverse of the right-hand panel, near the lower, exterior corner: Shomin Saku or Made by Shomin (Kobayashi Shomin, 1912 – 1994). Showa 22 or 1947.

With the tomobako or original box, inscribed on the exterior of the lid with the title: Kai Sho or Joyous Flight; and then: Kei-kinzoku Uchikomi-zogan Ko-byobu or Short Screen (of) Light Metals (executed in) Hammered Inlays, and sealed by the artist; on the reverse of the lid signed: Heian Shomin Saku or Made by Shomin (of) Kyoto, and sealed: Shomin. Kei-kinzoku or light metals now refers to metals with a low specific gravity (of between 4 and 5) such as aluminum.

This screen was made for exhibition at the 3rd Nitten art exhibition in Showa 22 or 1947, and it is documented in the Nittenshi, volume 16, page 263, number 149, Uchikomi-zogan Sora to Mizu Furosaki Byobu or Short Tea Ceremony Screen (depicting) Sky and Water (in) Hammered Inlays.

Born in Aomori Prefecture, Kobayashi Shomin studied uchidashi or metal hammering. He worked in Kyoto and exhibited at the Nitten after the Pacific War. Shomin became a Nitten judge and his work won numerous prizes (including the Nippon Geijutsuin Prize, the Minister of Education Prize, the Kikka Award, and the Hokuto Prize).

For his 1955 Nitten piece, c.f. Kagedo’s website’s archive section, Kagedo Japanese Art Kobayashi Shomin, 1955 Nitten Exhibition Giraffe – Kagedo Japanese Art.

With this tea room screen, Shomin creates an auspicious scene of barn swallows returning from over the sea. They fly over diagonal reflections of clouds in the billowed sea below, lit by the rising sun.

Barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) are a migratory species long associated in China and Japan with good fortune, prosperity, fidelity, and fertility. A house with nesting swallows was considered very lucky; and some Nihonga paintings depict the small wood shelves suspended by braided ropes from eaves to welcome a returning swallow’s nest. From Japan swallows migrate to Okinawa and Southeast Asia in the winter, returning in March and April.

Using light metals not associated with traditional metalwork, he hammers the aluminum ground with irregular, pebbled depressions that reflect light like the dappled sea. Over this diagonal wisps of abstracted, ovoid clouds run from the upper left towards the lower right in repeating bands. These nunome shallow inlays are hammered in sheets of metal fabric, some with the yellow of brass, some with the red of copper running below the brass and shading the reflections. The swallows fly above the sea, rising from the lower left into the distance of the upper right, the flight of eleven birds becoming smaller as each recedes into the distance. Shomin cuts an outline of each bird out of the aluminum ground, then inlays a yellow brass plate to halo each swallow with light. Then he details each swallow out of hammered iron, with a glint of silver inlay along the throat and breast, the eye a cutout to the gold brass below.

On the reverse of the screen, a dimpled aluminum plate covers each panel, decorated with shallow nunome inlays of metal fabric in vertical stripes that echo the stripes of bashofu, the famous banana-fiber fabric of Okinawa (southwest of the Japanese archipelago and associated with the winter resort of the migratory swallows). These inlaid stripes vary in their metals just as do the clouds on the front of the screen. Some glow yellow, some red-brown, some blacker. The widths vary playfully and align here together, there farther apart. From bashofu fabrics were made for centuries the finest summer kimono of Japan.

Thin sheets of hammered iron clad the rectangular cypress wood of the frame.

In the spring of 1936 the painter Nakamura Gakuryo (1890 – 1969) exhibited at the Kaiso Teiten exhibition a famous six panel screen depicting streaming clouds reflected in water and lit by the setting sun. No doubt Kobayashi Shomin saw the work then and perhaps the imagery of long, glowing clouds remained with him through the dark years of war. Reproduced in color in the Nittenshi, Volume 12, pages 22 – 23, this painting with its remarkable clouds also echoed in our minds as we contemplated Shomin’s coursing clouds.

Kobayashi Shomin must in 1947 have felt the joy of the returning spring swallows. His exhibition screen shimmers with traditional imagery seen through modern eyes, combining the hammering and chiseling of the past with the metals of the machine age, the aluminum of warplanes beaten into the imagery of renewal and peace.