kintsugi

2026 · glaze and gold, drawn by code

kintsugi is the japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer and gold. the cracks aren't hidden, they're traced in gold, so the history of the break becomes part of the bowl.

tap the bowl and it cracks from where you touched it. the pieces lift apart, settle back together, and gold runs along every crack. sometimes a small piece is lost and the gap is filled with solid gold. every break stays, so the bowl gets more golden the more it has been through. leave it alone and it breaks itself now and then.

how it works

• every bowl is computed pixel by pixel: the glaze (tenmoku, celadon, shino or ash) from layered noise, then the light on a concave surface, a rounded lip and the reflection of a window on the glaze
• the shards are voronoi cells scattered along rays from where you tapped, dense near the impact and sparse at the rim, the way ceramics actually break
• every crack runs through one shared warp, so the edges are jagged and the two sides of each crack still fit together exactly
• the gold flows outward from the impact as a ribbon of varying width with a bright wet bead at its front, then glints along the seams once it's dry
• the clink is synthesised too: a few inharmonic partials and a burst of filtered noise, with a soft bell when the gold sets