How Japan’s traditions of repairing and reusing have survived generations, connecting with modern movements of sustainability.

A kintsugi-repaired bowl is not simply an object– it’s a quiet manifesto. Delicate veins of gold trace across once-shattered ceramic, glinting like luminous scars. The bowl does not conceal its breakage; it wears it with dignity, transformed by its history rather than diminished by it. In that shimmering seam lies the essence of kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with golden lacquer.

Beyond mere repair technique, kintsugi reframes damage as beauty, and loss as a site of renewal. Perhaps that is why, centuries later, kintsugi continues to capture the contemporary imagination, with artists and designers around the world taking kintsugi’s core philosophy–that brokenness can be beautiful–and applying it in innovative ways to modern life.

Far from a mere historical footnote, kintsugi has become a metaphor and method across disciplines: a source of emotional healing, a model for sustainable design, and a muse for digital and conceptual art, an ancient practice repurposed to suit new generations.

Emotional Healing Through Golden Scars

Perhaps the most profound transformation of kintsugi has been in the realm of emotional healing and personal growth.

In therapy offices and wellness workshops, broken pottery is turning into a powerful symbol for mending the psyche. In one expressive arts therapy workshop, participants “broke a bowl and literally glued it back together to represent [their] own journey through pain and healing,” the act of destruction and reparation becoming a safe, tangible stand-in for the internal healing process.

A number of therapeutic workshops encourage people to symbolically “put the pieces back together” of something broken, mirroring the process of rebuilding their lives. One trauma specialist developed a program called Kintsugi Healing, explicitly blending kintsugi principles with modern trauma recovery research: by patiently practicing this art of repair, with all its required gentleness, attentiveness, and acceptance of imperfection, individuals learn to navigate their own healing with the same qualities.

It’s a far cry from a clinical approach to mental health–more holistic, even spiritual.

Contemporary U.S.-based kintsugi artist Naoko Fukumaru, a former museum conservator of over two decades, discovered the profound psychological impact of highlighting damage rather than hiding it, through her professional restoration work.

Fukumaru’s approach to kintsugi is deeply intertwined in her upbringing in Kyoto, where her great-grandfather, an antique dealer, lovingly repaired discarded objects.

After years of making cracks disappear invisibly in Western-style restorations, she turned to kintsugi as her antidote to perfectionism, aiming to “make the imperfect beautifully visible,” just like her great-grandfather. Instead of concealing damage, her work celebrates it, suggesting we don’t need to hide our wounds; we can mend and wear our scars with pride.

Sustainable Design and the Art of Repair

Modern designers and craftspeople concerned with sustainability have also latched onto kintsugi as a powerful counter-narrative to consumerism, in the belief that repair is more stylish than replacement. In an era of overflowing landfills, the idea that a broken object could become more beautiful (and more valuable) than a new one is a radical provocation.

Repair, reuse, upcycle: kintsugi was modeling these values centuries ago, and now it’s inspiring designers to do the same.

Watanabe Atsuko, a pioneering kintsugi artist and CEO of the sustainable ceramics brand ZEN, founded her studio in Iwate to rescue imperfect pottery from the trash. Working with local kilns, her team revives cracked or misshapen pieces that would normally be discarded, using kintsugi to transform flaws into features, a defect into a story, errors into an object of beauty. ZEN’s work exemplifies “kintsugi as eco-design,” merging aesthetics with sustainability.

Like trends of upcycling in the West, it transforms the broken into the meaningful, resulting in “new items that tell their very own story and thus gain an ideal value.” Rather than replace the old, kintsugi celebrates it. In a world of planned obsolescence –with iPhones deliberately slowed down by updates, and last season’s items cast off after one cycle of use–a kintsugi-repaired plate declares the opposite: old isn’t broken—it’s lived, a philosophy that’s the antithesis of our modern culture.

Designers worldwide are increasingly intrigued by this ethos, some even designing products meant to be repaired creatively when broken. An innovative project called “Repairing Society” by designer Xiaodong Ma critiques overconsumption through a kintsugi lens. Ma proposes that we “deviate from planned obsolescence” and cultivate longer relationships with objects by embedding repair into their lifecycle, mixing traditional craft with cutting-edge technology. In one instance, a fragmented ceramic piggy bank and dish were put back together with shimmering gold seams.

But alongside the classic lacquer-and-gold mends, Ma explored ultra-modern methods: an old wicker basket was repaired using 3D scanning and 3D-printed plastic parts, weaving new technology into the gaps of the broken antique. The contrast, striking; half of the basket remained its original rattan, while the other half was a neon-green lattice of bioplastic, clearly new yet shaped to fit the missing sections, pushing the concept of kintsugi into the future: the same philosophy of embracing imperfections, supercharged with modern tools.

This fusion of ancient and modern underscores a key point: kintsugi isn’t stuck in tradition; it’s evolving. The fact that someone can combine a 500-year-old lacquer technique with computer-aided design speaks to kintsugi’s robustness as an idea. It can survive translation into new materials and still carry its meaning. And that meaning, at its heart, is a sustainable one.

Whether by gold and lacquer or by biodegradable plastic, repairing what we have, cherishing it, even, might just be an antidote to the wastefulness of our times.

New Aesthetics in Contemporary Art and Media

It’s not only functional objects or personal psyches being pieced back together with gold. Kintsugi has also become a rich source of inspiration in contemporary art, architecture, and even digital media. Across the creative spectrum, makers are interpreting the “golden repair” in metaphorical ways, using it to explore themes of memory, resilience, and transformation in their work.

Curators have taken notice. In late 2024, Alison Bradley Projects in New York opened an entire group exhibition titled “Golden Veins: The Art of Kintsugi and Transformation,” featuring a star-studded roster of global artists beyond potters, the artists’ backgrounds ranged from painting, photography, sculpture, even performance art, a diversity united by the spirit of kintsugi. As curator Deborah Goodman Davis explains, through varied mediums, the artists collectively “explore resilience, transformation, and the beauty found in imperfection.” In other words, kintsugi has leapt from craft technique to wide-ranging artistic theme.

While some artists do reinterpret the literal technique of kintsugi, such as renowned multimedia artist Theaster Gates integrating it into his broader practice of urban cultural preservation, or Dutch artist Bouke de Vries assembling shattered porcelains into provocative sculptures, many others channel kintsugi more conceptually.

The late sculptor Louise Bourgeois created an entire series of prints called La Réparation meditating on psychological healing and trauma, which the curator linked to the ethos of kintsugi. Even performance and music find relevance: one of the exhibition’s events featured an orchestral piece titled “Kintsugi” by composer Salina Fisher, proving how metaphor migrates into sound.

One contemporary reinterpretation of kintsugi by artist Rachel Sussman doesn’t involve ceramics at all. Sussman takes the idea to the streets, literally. In her ongoing series “Sidewalk Kintsukuroi,” she fills cracks in urban pavement with metallic gold and photographs them, intervening in these overlooked fissures, and gilding the wounded pavement so that it catches the eye. The effect is unexpectedly poetic: a mundane piece of damaged infrastructure suddenly glitters as if treasured.

Sussman describes her work as a way to change how we perceive our environment, kintsugi’s metaphor expanding beyond personal or household scale to the civic, and even geological, scale. City streets have scars too, just as deserving of acknowledgment and healing.

Digital artists have also picked up on the kintsugi aesthetic, weaving its imagery into video art, animation, and graphic design. Golden crack motifs appear in surreal digital paintings and even video game art as symbols of restoring a fractured world, developing “modern kintsugi” methods that use computer modeling to design custom repair pieces.

At the 2024 SIGGRAPH Asia art gallery, for instance, an artist presented “Pla-tsugi: Modern Kintsugi through Digital Fabrication,” showcasing how broken objects could be scanned and then mended with 3D-printed joins that echo the gold seams of kintsugi. It’s essentially kintsugi translated into pixels and plastic, an unconventional yet innovative interpretation, confirming that kintsugi is not a static tradition stuck in time, but a living, evolving idea that creatives can remix endlessly.

Reinventing Repair

All over the world, kintsugi has found its foothold: the gold lines pioneered by Japan’s master artisans of ancient days have escaped the rim of the tea bowl and now run wild through modern culture, visible in psychology offices, sustainable fashion studios, avant-garde galleries, and beyond, as contemporary artists, designers, and professionals have embraced the philosophy behind kintsugi in their work.

In an age obsessed with perfection and newness, kintsugi offers a compassionate alternative: the art of the second chance. In the end, kintsugi is less about repairing pottery, and more about believing in the worth of what has been broken.

As we move forward, carrying our scars and rebuilding our broken parts, this ancient art turned contemporary phenomenon assures us that nothing, and no one, is beyond restoration.

And when we do restore, we have the opportunity to create something even more extraordinary than the unbroken original.

About the Author: Selin Kir (b. 1999, Istanbul) is a London-based writer, curator, researcher, and PR & media communications specialist with a background in Sociology and Culture, Criticism & Curation from Central Saint Martins. With the aim of discovering, refining, and debating the ideas that shape public discourse through artistic and cultural experiences, she applies her knowledge to material, popular, and archival culture.