Packaging makes for fascinating display

Press, 9 May 1981, Page 6

Packaging makes for fascinating display

After one glance round, the packaging exhibition at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery, it becomes immediately obvious that the Japanese have the art . pretty well wrapped up.

Ceramic sake bottles, wooden boxes of pastel-col-oured, multi-shaped sweets, ropes of straw braiding together . small fishes or wrapped delicacies, and ma 7 nyother ingeniously-packaged objects, sit on wooden shelves in one-corner of the gallery. The section has been set up like a small supermarket to give the exhibits a natural setting.

Tsutsumu, the art of Japanese packaging, makes a fascinating display in a country where the cardboard box and paper bag, usually covered with advertising, have become standard. The display becomes relevant as well when it is remembered that most of the techniques

and materials displayed are stilt used in Japan. Packaging is an age-old Japanese, art, and rather than getting a discouraging “Shall I wrap it?” after buying something, the shopper is asked “Is it a gift?” If the purchase is a gift, then the shop assistant, male ,or female, wraps it in gift paper, binds it in synthetic ribbon, and attaches a nim-bly-assembled, multi-loop bow.

Leaves are widely used all over Japan for- wrapping food and several examples of this form of tsutsumu are oh display in the gallery, They include rice cakes wrapped in a camellia leaf, which represents winter, a cherry leaf (spring) and an oak leaf (early summer). Festive paper packages, designed to contain lists of gifts'. exchanged between families of an engaged couple, can also be seen at the exhibition. These folded

packages are decorated with loops of mainly narrow gold, silver, red and black ribbon. Mr Bruce Robinson, an exhibitions officer at the gallery, said that the exhibition was very difficult to set up because some of the items had?.lost their numbers -and others had decayed: ■New fish for the hanging fish wrapping made of braided straw had to be sent from Japan to replace those which had gone bad. Because the hanger provides the correct ventilation, the fish can be preserved for six months, but the exhibition . has been on an extensive tour of the United States and Australia, and is now ending a long tour of New Zealand, so the fish have had to be replaced several times since the exhibition left Japan.

The 221 items in the exhibition will be on display in the: gallery until May 31, when they will go -on to Invercargill then return., to Japan.