Abe Motoshi is a man of extremes and contrasts. He is aggressively humble and astoundingly ambitious. He reveres his teacher, the legendary Shono Shounsai, and has actively and purposefully devoted himself to making work that looks nothing like his teacher’s. He describes creating a bamboo basket as “joyful” and “satisfying,” and in the next sentence, assures me that the process is “really arduous.”
There are baskets in the Shosoin treasure house that have survived for over a thousand years. When Abe makes a basket, that’s how long he intends it to last. He is painstaking with his calculations of width and depth (it took him two months to do the math for Light Adornment). This allows him to plait the bamboo together very tightly, increasing the strength and solidity of the final form.
