THE BEAUTY OF BROKEN THINGS

“I served as a medic during the Vietnam War. At the 22^nd Casualty Staging Flight in Da Nang, I worked on well over 600 battle casualties. The mission was to stabilize the wounded and keep them alive for 24 hours so that they could be flown out of the country to a hospital where their limbs or lives might be saved via surgical intervention. Nowadays, when people think about surgery, they think of a doctor opening a section of the body, fixing what’s wrong, and then closing it back up. In Vietnam, surgery was different. These patients came in pre-opened.”

This harrowing recollection introduced me to artist and veteran Wayne Miller at Miller White Fine Arts in South Dennis, Massachusetts. Before his artist talk at the opening reception for his current “Kintsugi Paintings: Paintings in the Narrative Tradition” exhibition, Miller himself ushered me aside, offering a personal window into the life behind his exhibition, curated by Susan R. Danton, M.A., that runs through September 12.

The show’s title references the ancient Japanese art of Kintsugi — repairing broken pottery with urushi lacquer dusted in powdered gold, silver or platinum. Rather than disguising damage, this technique highlights fractures with luminous veins of precious metal. As a natural extension of Wabi-Sabi, Kintsugi honors imperfection, transforming breakage and repair into a conspicuous reminder of an object’s history, strength and resilience.