Aerial View of a Futuristic City Essential Oil Box in Urushi Carving

As in the title, I made a box for storing essential oil.
Boxes to store incense were produced widely during the Edo period.
I thought it would be a good idea to have a box to store aromatic things other than incense containers in our modern life and made this box.
I measured the size of an essential oil bottle and made this box to store 5 bottles each, 40 bottles in total. I used Japanese horse chestnut with tiger stripes and finished it with wiped urushi.
As for the structure of the box, I placed a partition in the middle and used a total of 8 hinges on both sides.
As I have been producing pieces with designs of motifs from the Edo period up to today from a bird's-eye view during these past few years, I used the design of an aerial view of a futuristic city for this piece.
As I have been doing with my earlier artwork, I placed a magnet in the urushi carved wooden piece and using a braided cord I made a buckle. The design of the box is based on the design of the main entrance of the former Imperial Hotel in Tokyo.

• Carved lacquer

  Carved lacquer (choshitsu) is made by first coating a piece in dozens of layers of colored lacquer. Then, a carving blade is used to cut into the lacquer and produce three-dimensional relief carvings.