The New Traditional

It was a thrill to be given the opportunity to contribute a chapter to the just-published-in-North America book, The New Traditional: Heritage, Craftsmanship, and Local Identity. The point of the book is to celebrate those who are preserving, handing down, and picking up the ways of ancient traditional craft. It’s a hopeful book, and we need hope and a connection to a more rooted past during these anxious times.

The book is published by Gestalten, a Berlin-based house that specializes in areas ranging from architecture, visual culture and contemporary art to food and beverages and fashion. I wrote about three different breweries (Dewazakura, Kuheiji, and Mitobe) that are both returning to traditional handcrafted ways while at the same time innovating and taking sake to new levels of deliciousness. The photographs, too, are gorgeous, shot by my collaborator Irwin Wong, a Chinese-Australian based in Tokyo.

So what else will you find in the book? The over one hundred-year-old last traditional tattoo artist in the norther Philippines region of Kalinga, who practices her art by rubbing a mixture of charcoal and water on the tip of a pomelo tree thorn, then vigorously pounds it under her subject’s skin with pieces of bamboo—at a rate of 100 taps per minute. Ouch.

There’a an industrial designer who crafts beautiful lamps out of plastic bottles clogging Columbia’s portion of the Amazon River, a Montreal blacksmith who is reverse engineering ancient forging tools, and a chapter on the dwindling number of haenyeo, the female free divers of Jeju Island, who hunt for urchin and abalone on the sea floor.

There’s lots more, and I hope you’ll get a chance to check it out.