Healing with Gold: The Art of Kintsugi on Ceramics & Beyond

Meher McArthur is an Asian art historian specializing in Japanese art. She read Japanese Studies at Cambridge University and holds an MA in Japanese art history from London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). She was Curator of East Asian Art at Pacific Asia Museum (PAM, now USC PAM) and Creative Director for the Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden, both in Pasadena, and also worked as Academic Curator for Scripps College, Claremont and Art and Cultural Director for JAPAN HOUSE Los Angeles. 

She curates traveling exhibitions for International Arts & Artists (IA&A), including the recent exhibition Washi Transformed: New Expressions in Japanese Paper and the current exhibition KIMONO: Garment, Canvas, and Artistic Muse. Her exhibition Sound of Water: Feminine Expressions of Fluidity recently opened at Descanso Gardens in La-Cañada-Flintridge and will run through January 3, 2027. She will open Healing with Gold: The Japanese Art of Kintsugi on Ceramics and Beyond at the JACCC on September 12, Energetic Connections: The Ki Paintings of Yoshio Ikezaki at the Shumei Hall Gallery in Pasadena on October 4, and Painted Prayers: The Japanese Folk Painting Tradition of Ema at Mingei International Museum on October 17.

Her publications include Japanese Buddhist and Shinto Prints From the Collection of Manly P. Hall (Sam Fogg, 1996), Gods and Goblins: Folk Paintings from Otsu (PAM, 1999), Reading Buddhist Art (Thames & Hudson, 2002) and The Arts of Asia (Thames & Hudson, 2005), An ABC of What Art Can Be (Getty Museum, 2010), New Expressions in Origami Art (Tuttle, 2017). Her memoir A Japanese Art Journey was published by Tuttle in late 2025. She lives in Pasadena, CA.

Richard Bohn is an American artist and poet based in Spokane, Washington. Since the early 1990s, he has been creating mended ceramic hearts by piecing together ceramic fragments to produce forms that echo lives that are “complete in their brokenness, remembering their wholeness.” By enhancing the cracks between the fragments with gold powder, he brings the philosophy of kintsugi into his exquisite mended ceramic hearts.

Alan Chin is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. He received a BFA in Ceramics and Painting from the California College of the Arts in 2011 and went on to study at the Academie Minerva in the Netherlands. In his ceramic works, he uses the material process to explore how meaning is shaped through everyday forms and actions. His projects often engage the tension between structure and instability, revealing how objects carry emotional, cultural, and historical significance through use and time.

alan-chin.com | @alanchinart

A Vancouver-based kintsugi artist, Naoko Fukumaru spent over 25 years as a ceramic restorer before becoming a kintsugi artist. She has exhibited her work in Vancouver and has been promoting kintsugi through The Art of Kintsugi, an online event in collaboration with the Embassy of Japan. She is currently organizing a touring exhibition of 100 pieces of her kintsugi work that will travel to museums around the United States from 2026 to 2028.

naokofukumaru.com | @fukumarukintsugistudio

Kyoko Ohwaki is a kintsugi artist based in Kamakura, Japan. She began teaching herself kintsugi in 2009 and successfully held a solo exhibition and demonstration of her kintsugi works at the gallery turtle&hare in Oakland, California in 2014. Currently, she is active as a kintsugi instructor in Kamakura and throughout Japan and holds workshops to promote kintsugi.

@kyokoohwaki

Miya Smith was born and raised in Japan, where she trained in tea ceremony, ikebana, and calligraphy. Now a longtime resident of Orange County, California, she works as a metalsmith and kintsugi artist. Her background in metalsmithing naturally drew her to kintsugi, a practice that demands the same patience, precision, and careful handwork. Smith taught herself the technique and has been practicing it for nearly a decade. Her approach is creative, blending traditional kintsugi methods with modern techniques and materials. With her extensive knowledge of tools and materials across multiple crafts, as well as her deep understanding of Japanese history and culture, Smith brings a uniquely broad perspective to her teaching. She teaches kintsugi workshops across North America.

@miyasilversmith

Jeffrey Takumi Sugishita is a multidisciplinary artist born and raised in Los Angeles, California. Sugishita's discipline is rooted in the examination of the self, which traverses between being a member of the digital native generation while simultaneously being raised commuting to the various wildernesses of California, devoid of technology and facing nothing but the pure physicality of the Earth. Elements of the natural and the technological are imbued in Sugishita's work—not in opposition, but in unison, as is the state of his being.

sugiworks.com | @sugiworks

Yukako Tanaka is a ceramic artist who trained in kintsugi with Kyoko Ohwaki and began exploring kintsugi as a way of repairing her own ceramics that were broken or misfired in the kiln. Because she had an allergic reaction to lacquer (which is highly toxic), she developed "modern kintsugi" using natural materials—urushi (lacquer) and kin (gold)—and a hybrid chemical solvent called "new urushi," which does not cause rashes. She also uses non-metallic gold powder, allowing people with metal allergies to use it safely.

@ucacoceramics

Shoshi Watanabe (above) is a Japanese ceramic artist based in Los Angeles. He holds an MFA in Ceramics from UCLA and works as the UCLA art department's ceramics lab supervisor. His personal practice includes functional pottery as well as fine art sculptural work.

shoshiwatanabe.com | @shoshiwatanabe

Yosei Shibata (below) is a Los Angeles based art director, born and raised in Tokyo. Currently a Digital Art Director at FIGS, Yosei specializes in creating brand identity, graphic design, and art direction for fashion, art, culture, and commerce. Yosei and Shoshi are friends and frequent collaborators, including on a kintsugi project.

yoseishibata.com | @yoseishibata_design

Miya Ando is a Japanese and American artist based in New York City. A student of East Asian studies, philosophy, and aesthetics, Ando also apprenticed with a master metalsmith in Japan. Her artworks—created in carefully selected media, ranging from metal, wood, and acrylic to the most delicate of leaves—are a physical articulation of her own contemplation of the cycles of nature and the passage of time. Her work is shown all over the world.

miyaando.com | @studiomiyaando

Christen Austin is an artist based in Fontana, California, whose paintings capture the essence of African American culture. Her powerful portraits, rendered primarily in acrylic, express deep emotion within a modern and often surreal aesthetic. In 2022, she created a series of work inspired by the idea of kintsugi, translating the Japanese artistic practice into paintings of human figures to illustrate the various ways we heal our broken pieces.

caustinarts.com | @c.austinart

Leah Knecht is a Japanese American artist based in Pasadena, California. Her work is a cross between painting and assemblage, or paintings that incorporate actual objects and ephemera. The tactile quality and the history or meaning of these objects complement the painted or mixed media surfaces. Knecht gravitates toward themes such as history, transformation, and social and political injustice, and is constantly experimenting with different materials and techniques to support the subject matter. Knecht was commissioned by Metro in 2019 to create a neighborhood poster for Altadena.

@leahknecht.2

Ted Meyer is an artist based in Southern California who has focused much of his work on bodies—both healthy and in states of trauma and healing. After years of making work about his own rare illness, Meyer changed focus and began visually telling the stories of other people who have been through major traumas, creating graphic yet beautiful depictions of people’s suddenly altered bodies and the resulting scars, as well as curating exhibitions of works by artists facing various types of physical trauma. For over 16 years, his series Scarred for Life has continued to grow and now consists of at least one hundred artistically enhanced monoprints taken directly from the scarred skin of his subjects. Ted also uses his artwork to teach the medical community how treatments affect patients long term.

tedmeyer.com | @tedmeyerart

Kristine Schomaker is a Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist, art historian, writer, and advocate for artists. She received her BA in Art History and an MA in Studio Art from California State University Northridge. For over a decade, she has been cutting things up—paintings, photographs, and 52 years of personal archives. She shredded love letters and diet plans, sliced through work she made twenty-five years ago, buzzed off her hair, and preserved it in jars. This cutting practice started as a compulsive response to kidney cancer, eating disorder recovery, and being a fat woman in a culture that profits from shame.

kristineschomaker.net | @kristineschomaker

Taya Shikkiten is a lacquer studio in Wajima on the Noto Peninsula in Ishikawa Prefecture, an area devastated when a magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck on January 1, 2024. The studio specializes in Wajima lacquer, a nationally recognized Important Intangible Cultural Property. Taya Shikkiten was founded in 1818 and is now run by Takahiro Taya, a tenth-generation lacquer artist. After the loss and destruction of much of their studio and artistic creations in the earthquake, related fires, and recent flooding in the region, Takahiro and his father, Akihiro, decided to repair some of their damaged lacquerware using kintsugi.

wajimanuri.co.jp/e_tayashikkiten

Liberty Worth is a multidisciplinary artist, poet, educator, and public speaker. Her textile wall paintings are created with cast-off or reused materials, often sourced from different industries. She frequently receives large rolls of leftover fabric from fashion designers and interior decorators and incorporates leftover clothing scraps such as edges or hems, using everything from cotton, silk, wool, and linen to discarded face masks. Drawn to shapes that move and swirl, she pieces together the fabric scraps to form works that resemble branching trees, flowing water, spiraling shells, pulsing vortexes, and growing life.

libertyworthart.com | @libertyworthart