Kyoto City Industrial Exhibition Hall

The Kyoto Museum of Traditional Crafts on the lower level of the Kyoto City Industrial Exhibition Hall.  The building is sort of a medium sized convention center.  After visiting the museum, I visited 3 large rooms in the convention center.  Presumably, different groups had rented each space.

The first room had hand made items, and lots of older people.  There were, for example, 10 similar calligraphy hangings, 10 similar hand-sewed bags, and other crafts including knitting, oil painting, origami, wood projects, paper flowers and so on.  It was as if I had been dropped into an Iowa County Fair, or even the Arlington Co. Fair. 

Except here, everything was in multiples, with slight variations.  There were no price tags, and there were no prizes pinned on things.  I looked at some crocheted slippers -- slightly different sizes, and an assortment of colors.  The nearby woman explained to me (in Japanese) that each slipper was made from 8 squares.  Then she showed me with great reverence the work of her teacher.  Suddenly I understood that the work was being displayed in groups as students displayed their work together.  Now I related it to the displays at the end of our week of classes at the John Campbell folk school. 

The second room had signs, "Home Do", and its focus was home remodeling.  There were a couple of sample kitchens, some sample pieces of flooring, and lots of before/after remodeling posters.  As well there were lots of empty tables, presumably at which it was hoped that contractors and homeowners would be sitting down.  In fact, there was only one couple in the whole place.  The recession may not be over yet....

And the third room was some sort of college student art show from an "Art Club".  Almost all was two dimensional art, and a lot of it was "cute".   There were a handful of students at tables by the entrance, and a handful of folks looking at the art.  There was an interesting notebook available that showed some of the pieces as they were being done.  Three of the pictures were quite striking large format oil paintings -- one of the head of a mountain sheep, one of a wooden carving that guards the shrine gates, and one of two koi.