Honolulu Museum of Art · Shangri La Bamboo and Paper Hand Fan, Islamic Strapwork Tile Design, Split-Rib Uchiwa Construction with Decorated Handle, 2012 or Later
Viridian Eclection
The PieceA large rigid hand fan in bamboo and paper, printed with an Islamic strapwork pattern and issued by the Honolulu Museum of Art for Shangri La.The leaf is close to a foot across and almost ...
The Piece
A large rigid hand fan in bamboo and paper, printed with an Islamic strapwork pattern and issued by the Honolulu Museum of Art for Shangri La.
The leaf is close to a foot across and almost triangular, with a rounded outer edge. Across it runs a continuous interlace: ivory bands crossing over and under one another to form eight-pointed stars and lozenges, laid over grounds of deep green, indigo and oxblood, with small ringed dots set into the wider fields.
The outer edge is bound in a narrow paper tape printed in a navy-and-white check, and the two shoulders where the leaf meets the frame are reinforced with purple paper tabs.
Printed down the right-hand margin of the leaf: Honolulu Museum of Art, honolulumuseum.org, and Shangri La with its hexagonal star device and shangrilahawaii.org.
Turn it over and the construction is the whole interest. A single length of bamboo has been split lengthwise into roughly forty fine ribs, which fan out from the throat and are held in a bent bamboo hoop that forms the entire outer frame. The unsplit end is the handle, tapered and rounded.
The handle carries a repeating row of concentric arcs burned or printed in dark brown — a simple rainbow motif, drawn at slightly different sizes along its length.
History & Provenance
The date is fixed by the name on the leaf, not by anything about the way it looks.
The institution was the Honolulu Academy of Arts from its founding in 1927. The Contemporary Museum was folded into it in July 2011, and in December of that year the board voted to adopt a new public name from March 2012: the Honolulu Museum of Art. A fan printed with that name cannot have been made before 2012.
Shangri La is the other half of the story, and the better half. It was the Honolulu home of the tobacco heiress Doris Duke, built from 1937 on five acres at Black Point, and filled over nearly sixty years with Islamic art gathered from Morocco to India — tilework, carved and painted ceilings, textiles, metalwork and whole architectural interiors installed as rooms. Duke left it as a museum. The Honolulu institution has run public access under an agreement with the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art since 2001, and tours have departed from the museum since 6 November 2002.
The pattern on the leaf belongs squarely to that collection. Interlaced strapwork resolving into eight-pointed stars is one of the central figures of Islamic ornament, worked in tile, plaster, wood and paint from Spain to Iran, and it appears at Shangri La across several media. The colouring here — ivory bands over green, purple and oxblood — reads as glazed tilework rather than paint.
The fan itself is a Japanese form. A rigid fan made by splitting one bamboo stem into ribs, bending a hoop around them and papering both faces is an uchiwa, made this way for centuries and still made this way now. The museum did not invent the object; it printed its collection onto a traditional one.
Offered as what it is: a museum edition rather than an antique, dated 2012 or later on the printed name.
Product Details
| Object | Rigid bamboo-and-paper hand fan, uchiwa construction |
| Dimensions | Approximately 15 in overall length, the leaf approximately 11 in across |
| Construction | One length of bamboo split into roughly forty ribs, held in a bent bamboo hoop; paper laid over both faces; navy-and-white checked paper edge binding; purple paper reinforcement tabs at both shoulders; tapered unsplit handle |
| Design | Islamic strapwork interlace — ivory bands forming eight-pointed stars and lozenges over green, indigo and oxblood grounds, with ringed dots |
| Handle | Repeating concentric-arc motif in dark brown along one face |
| Printed Marks | Honolulu Museum of Art · honolulumuseum.org · Shangri La with hexagonal star device · shangrilahawaii.org |
| Era | 2012 or later. The Honolulu Museum of Art name was adopted in March 2012; the institution was the Honolulu Academy of Arts before that. |
| Condition | Good, and structurally sound. The bamboo frame, hoop, ribs and handle are all intact and firm, the checked edge binding runs unbroken, and both purple shoulder tabs are present and attached. The printing is bright and the lettering fully legible. The paper leaf is creased — several long diagonal creases run across the face, with finer parallel wrinkling following the ribs, and there is a crumpled spot where two creases meet toward the right side. A short split runs in from the edge at one point beside the binding. These are stated in full and are visible in the photographs. Condition Guaranteed. |
| Availability | One of a Kind — 1 Available |
Why It Belongs in Your Home
Hang it. This is a pattern panel with a handle, and it does more on a wall than it ever will in a drawer.
Eleven inches of geometric interlace in green, purple and oxblood reads as a graphic object from across a room, and the bamboo handle running off at an angle gives it a direction that a framed square never has. A row of three, or one on its own above a doorway, both work.
The colours are the useful part. Muted green and dusty purple over a warm oxblood ground sit against plaster, unpainted wood, brass and dark paint without fighting any of them, and there is no white in the pattern to go cold.
It also carries a genuinely good story for a small object. Doris Duke spent sixty years assembling Islamic art on a cliff above the Pacific, and this is a piece of that ornament printed onto a Japanese bamboo fan and sold in Honolulu. Very little at this size has that much behind it.
The reverse is worth leaving visible if you can. Forty bamboo ribs radiating from a single split stem is a beautiful piece of engineering, and it is the side nobody expects to look at.
And it still works. It is a real fan, light in the hand and stiff enough to move air.
A note on care. Keep it dry and keep it out of direct sun. The leaf is paper and the colours are printed; sunlight will flatten them, and damp will cockle the paper and lift the edge binding.
Do not try to press the creases out. Paper over bamboo ribs will not flatten, and heat or weight will crack the ribs underneath.
Dust it with a soft dry brush rather than a cloth, and hang it by the frame or the handle rather than pinning through the leaf.
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