bubun is a jewelry duo formed by Megumi Jin and Nobuyuki Jin in 2016. Working with colorless, transparent glass, they explore jewelry as something that exists at the boundary between the body and the surrounding space. Though solid, glass can appear almost fluid, at times dissolving into its surroundings. They are drawn to this liminal quality, and to the way colorless glass allows form and structure to emerge without the associations of color.
Alongside sculptural approaches rooted in glassworking techniques, they have developed their own method of assembling individually shaped glass elements with thread. Each element has a shallow groove that holds the thread, so the pieces connect without fusing or bonding. The thread lends the resulting structure a subtle resilience, bringing rigid glass closer to the body. They carry out every stage of production themselves, from glassworking and thread assembly to metalwork. Their work seeks to gently shift the relationship between body and space, opening new connections across that boundary.

The name bubun, which literally means “part,” symbolically expresses our enduring interest in parts. It points to the detail within jewelry, jewelry on the body, the body within the universe, and also to the memories evoked by adornment and the fleeting moments that unfold in a life lived with it. In this sense, it does not refer to any single part, but to every kind of “part” across all scales and spans, from the micro to the macro, from the past to the future. We are drawn to parts when they reveal an autonomous beauty without being sacrificed to what is called the whole, and when, in harmony with their surroundings, they acquire a new beauty on a larger scale. At the same time, by focusing on the parts that make up a beautiful domain, one can continue to discover new forms of beauty, one after another. Through our work, we hope to create pieces that can become one point of departure for this continuous process of discovering and acquiring beauty through leaps from part to part. We also hope that, in every sense of the word, each piece may become a “part” of the person who wears it.

© 2026 bubun