Monday/ the art of the impossible

(This is a late post).  I found and snapped these pictures from a documentary on NHK World’s website  www.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/.   It started out with the incredible colored ivory carvings of artist Ando Rokuzan (1885-1955).  I couldn’t find any of his artwork on-line .. probably because the texts for it are in Japanese. No detail was too tiny. They don’t know how he colored the ivory, and the tools that he used must have been ones he made himself.  But then the curator of the art museum told the journalist of an artist called Fuyiki Maehara that lives nearby that makes wood carvings of real-life items : a tin can with an open lid and a branch with berries in it; a barbed wire; the shell of a dead cicada bug.  He carved out the inside to make it hollow, carved out the detail on the wings, carved the legs of the insect — out of a single chunk of wood.  He makes his tools with the same techniques that were used centuries ago to make samurai swords.  Is it art, to make something that looks exactly like the thing for real?  Why does the artist do it? asked the journalist.  ‘I love doing it .. and to see if I could’, was the reply.