Read our students' stories that start from the CUHK and go further beyond.

“Cracks are where light gets in.” This is what Enders Wong has learnt from the art of kintsugi. The kintsugi and ceramic artist’s workbench is perennially filled with ceramic fragments. Day after day, Enders applies lacquer glue to broken pottery using the kintsugi technique, the ancient Japanese art of imperfection. By painting over the cracks with golden power, the artist not only gives the broken items a new lease of life, but also redefines their value. 

Sticking together broken pottery using the kintsugi technique seems a simple craft, but it cannot be done without immense patience. It takes a full week for the lacquer glue to dry completely before another layer of glue can be applied, and this is a step that may have to be repeated over the course of several weeks. But Enders is never daunted by the process. Patience is what he has, and he applies this virtue not only to his art but also life in general. Underneath his composed and calm demeanour is a belief that although flaws are inevitable in life, time is always the greatest healer and all we have to do is to take it easy.

In kintsugi, artists use shimmering golden lacquer to fill in and highlight the cracks of a broken object. This is an art form that inspires us to face our flaws and missteps in life head-on without holding back. With the scars are turned into art, the once broken object gets a new lease of life and can start anew. 

During his years at CUHK, Enders initially felt lost when he first dived into the world of art. He recalls, “Many fine arts students find themselves spending years hitting dead ends. This is because we tend to approach art from an aesthetic point of view. But during my studies at CUHK, I found that our teachers never gave us definite explanations of things. Rather, they let us think, reflect, and learn through trials and errors. I think it echoes the idea of yohaku in Japanese tea ceremony, which emphasises the beauty of blank spaces.” 

The absence of model answers has taught Enders to view things from multiple perspectives. Through the deadlocks he frequently encountered, he has learnt not to worry about flaws. “There is no such thing as good or bad, as everything eventually leads to goodness. This is also what kintsugi is all about.”

Enders started off as a ceramics artist, and he discovered kintsugi thanks to a broken bowl. One day his mother broke his favourite blue ceramic bowl by accident. Infuriated, Enders looked for every possible way to repair the broken object. Eventually he found kintsugi. His newfound technique did not immediately calm his anger as he still could not repair the bowl, but over time, he came to understand something profound. 

“At first I was very angry with what happened. Yet kintsugi has made me realise it is possible for us to turn a mistake into something good.” That blue bowl is still sitting on Enders’ workbench. 

Now that Enders has become a teacher committed to passing on the spirit of kintsugi, he finds himself continuing to learn about the art through his students. One of his students had learnt kintsugi for two years but still struggled to create a golden seam on a ceramic bottle with a crack. Yet one day, the student, inspired by the essence of kintsugi, decided to embrace imperfections and inserted a piece of clear crystal into the crack, creating a lighting effect inside the bottle. Peeking through the tiny opening of the bottle, Enders saw a beautiful world lit up by a soft ray of light, which felt just as uplifting as seeing a light at the end of a tunnel. Beauty in imperfections - that’s what life is about.