Somin with Kao (fake)

Ford:

I’ve hesitated to comment as I’m feeling a bit uneasy about these two pieces.

There’s a great deal to say that can be argued indefinitely but what I will say at this stage and that I feel is objectively correct is ;

Given the apparent age of the works, referencing the lives of the alleged makers, the shibuichi is perfectly clean, with not even a trace of aged patina or other dirt, grime old oxidised wax etc. The ‘nashiji’ grain appears as clear as though it was patinated yesterday.

There’s a lighter halo around the seppa-dai. What this tells me is those lighter patches had suffered heavier oxidation/corrosion than the rest of the plate. The whole plate was then subsequently completely re-polished to redo the patina. Any area that had suffered excessive oxidation etc. and had not been adequately prepared will now patinate lighter because the alloy on the surface at those areas is now silver rich and copper depleted. It’s always the less ‘noble’ metal that is sacrificed in these sort of corrosion effects. So in my opinion this is a new patina and the whole tsuba have been lightly re-surfaced/polished.

It is possible that they have merely been a little heavy handidly over-cleaned but I see a few other blemishes that all point towards more towards a, less than expert, refinish rather then over-clean.

I’m a little bothered by the excessive encroachment of the chiselling onto the seppa-dai areas.

On the whole the designs are all fairly convincing and essentially straight out of the Yokoya design book, so to speak. You can easily find identical examples in the existing documented works.

Looking closely at the actual cutting though I can’t silence a niggling hesitation in my mind. Kata-kiri work is by it’s very nature meant to be bold and expressive. A strained attention to super accuracy is not to be expected nor probably desired. But what we would expect is a degree of fluency and compositional integrity.

It’s a bit like a fine drawing by a noted artist compared to a careful traced copy of the same. Like a good drawing good kata-kiri ought to exhibit a sensitive and dynamic relationship and interplay between every single cut or mark. And in that vein each and every cut ought to be alive and expressive in terms of its shape. How does it being there add to the work? There’s so much to say and discuss but it’s late here so I’ll leave it at that for now.