Which Japanese art repairs broken pottery with gold, making the damage the feature?

Kintsugi, which joins the pieces with lacquer and dusts the seam with gold, so the break is the most conspicuous thing about the finished bowl. The repair is not disguised and is not meant to be; the object's history is treated as part of it.

The technique is genuine lacquer work, not glue and gilt. Urushi, tapped from a tree and toxic until cured, is applied in thin layers over weeks in a humid box - lacquer hardens by absorbing moisture rather than drying - and the result is waterproof, food-safe and stronger than the pot around it. A proper repair takes months.

It belongs to a wider aesthetic, wabi-sabi, which values the worn, the asymmetric and the impermanent over the flawless. The origin story has a shogun sending a cracked tea bowl to China for repair and getting it back stapled with ugly metal, prompting Japanese craftsmen to find something better - probably a later tidy-up, but it fits the tea ceremony's habit of prizing a specific imperfect object over a perfect anonymous one.