Bronze incense burner in the form of a fan, depicting a traditional Japanese houseon stilts, with a rice thatch roof. This subject is treated with great realism, from the weaved texture of each wall to theway of representingeach window. The sense of detail is easily noticeable when you are looking at the small branch (probably from a mushroom) that grows in between the norenand the circular windowon the right side. An incense burner is a hollow artifact made of a heat tolerant material (metal or ceramic). Generally designed to hold burning coal, they exist in a wide variety of shapes and structure, most often it is an hollow object that could hold an heating point at the bottom on which incense (balls,powder,sheets) is dropped. Most of the time a decorated lid closes the composition and enablesthe fumes to pass through. Even though archaic designs are reproduced to this day, incense burners are just a pretext to invent and represent huge sculptures surrounded by smoke. The subjects are often very well chosen and by combining their utilitarian function to the beauty of its conception you sometime reach the point where appreciating the functionality within art is becoming a performance itself. Here the abundant fumes might exit through the large amount of small and huge openings within each wall, but mostly they would elevate and pass through the perforation of the roof toimitate the fumes leaving from the unventilated roof of a traditional house.

Japan –Meiji era (1868-1912)Height:16 cm –Width:13 cm –Depth: 10 cm