Embassy of Japan, Japan Foundation

and

Croatian Association of Artists

Ring Gallery  invite you to exhibition opening  

PAINTING FOR JOY;

NEW JAPANESE PAINTING IN 1990s

Opening :  28.January 2010. 19 h

Exhibition is open unti 21. February 2010

Makotoa Aida

Yoshitaka Echizenya

Miran Fukuda

Takanobu Kobayashi

Naofumi Maruyama

Takashi Murakami

Yoshitomo Nara

Nobuhiko Nukata

Taro Chiezo

The artist featured in this exhibition were born between the late 1950s and the early 1960s so that they are more or less in their thirties. Other then the fact that they all paint figurative images, neither the pictoral subject nor the style of painting have much in common. They grew up during a period when Japan was achieving a high level of economic growth and fully experienced the process of drastic change Japan underwent. They rediscovred painting , which was regarded a “dead” form after being baptized by Formalism, and set it free from the closed framework of “art”. Their aim is to make painting an “open ” site for communication on an individual basis.

Miki Okabe

(Extract from the exhebition catalogue: „ Introduction – Painting for Joy: New Japanese Painting in 1990s“

Introduction

––Painting for Joy: New Japanese Painting in 1990s

Miki Okabe (Exhibition Division, The Japan Foundation)

      The artist is condemned to please. By no means may he create an object of aversion in a painting. A scarecrow is for frightening the birds and keeping them away from the fields whereas paintings, even the most terrifying, are there to attract visitors.

–––Georges Bataille, ‘Art, Exercise of Cruelty’ in 1949

To describe the rapid change in the Japanese society of the 1990s in short, it should probably be said that the principle of autonomy, which modernism aspired to in all fields, has began to sway from its very root.

  For example, the spread of personal computers has not only revolutionized the method of communication but created a new human relationship through the use of the PC. What with the spread of a massive amount of information and the presentation of virtual reality, the sense of reality which each person should have possessed individually has been lost. Typical examples of this phenomenon would be the strange unreality of the war scenes broadcast all over the world during the Gulf War or the way the people grasped the “comic-like” reality of the eschatological idea of Armageddon advocated by Aum-Shinrikyo.

  The computer has also influenced the way music and art are received. For example, the latest music can be listened to directly on the Internet without having to go and buy a CD. Likewise, artworks can also be enjoyed in the virtual space provided on the Internet without having to go to a museum. Such experiences reach beyond the question of the reproduction of artworks and have altered the way of our sensibility.

  The drastic changes in the environment surrounding art described above have influenced the way of art, the existence of artists, and even the role of the museums.

  Firstly, the museum’s role as a place where art exists has changed. Due to the vogue to build local museums run by the prefecture or city, which began in the 1980s, the total number of museums and, subsequently, the number of exhibitions have increased, spurring the trend to offer “art” as a form of leisure. The museum no longer retains its solemn image as a “sanctuary of art” and is required to be opened to the society and play a role of some sort. As Adorno said, it is as if the museum has been incorporated as one element of a gigantic cultural industry.

  While it would be easy to reject the current situation of art and art museums as commercialistic, the fact that, for better or worse, that is what is required by the society at the moment cannot be ignored.

  There has also been a remarkable increase of media to convey visual images not only by means of photographs and cinema but in the domain of subculture such as television, videos, games, and cartoons. Art is influenced by such images and vice versa. As objects for consumption, they create one fashion after another and disappear.

  It is interesting that, at a time like this, “painting”, which is a traditional and rather conservative genre of art, has begun to be spotlighted again from the mid-1990s.

  The artists featured in this exhibition were born between the late 1950s and the early 1960s so that they are more or less in their thirties. Other than the fact that they all paint figurative images, neither the pictorial subject nor the style of painting have much in common. They grew up during a period when Japan was achieving a high level of economic growth and fully experienced the process of drastic change Japan underwent. They rediscovered painting, which was regarded a “dead” form after being baptized by Formalism, and set it free from the closed framework of “art”. Their aim is to make painting an “open” site for communication on an individual basis.

I. From Simulationism to New Pop

Ever since the 1970s, Japanese painting has long been under the strong influence of Formalism and Conceptualism. Even when New Painting with expressionistic features such as intense brushwork and bright colouring swept over other countries, the situation in Japan remained basically unaltered. In the 1980s, installations became the mainstream in art and painting was regarded a “dead” form of art. From the late 1980s to the early 1990s, a method known as Simulation began to be employed in photography as it benefited the characteristics of that medium. This gradually spread to the domain of painting. By quoting art historical masterpieces, which we accept unconditionally as art, and existing images, it was an attempt to clarify the artistic and social conditions which define them. Miran Fukuda and Takashi Murakami were active from those days and were considered representative figures of this trend.

  The characteristic of Fukuda’s paintings is her everlasting curiosity and quest regarding the act of “seeing” and the background system that enables us to “see”. She focuses on classic European portraits and attaches real lace instead of the elaborate lace portrayed in the picture or composes a painting from the viewpoint of the figures depicted in Velazquez’s Las Meninas. There is also a work in which she has stuck a Lipton tea bag on a renowned painting in the history of Western art such as Rembrandt’s Danae Visited by Zeus in the Form of a Shower of Gold. By incorporating a real fragment into the painting, the artist is trying to create a new relationship between the viewer and the painting. She also provides amusing tricks in her paintings such as Grated Radish and Kewpie Mayonnaise, in which the commonplace reality is enlarged in the painting and turned into an object so that it appears even more abstract than an abstract painting.

  Takashi Murakami states that it was from 1994 onwards that he seriously undertook painting. His starting point was a distrust in the modern painting which formed the mainstream in the academism of the time. Having specialized in nihonga at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, in his The King’s Seat of Two Dimensional Perspective Series, he chose a renowned picture scroll of medieval Japan entitled The Legends of Mt.Shigi as his subject and depicted the mysterious pot, which suddenly appears in a rich man’s house and empties the treasury while everyone else is making a fuss, as the leitmotif. One of the characteristics of Murakami’s works is this wondrous sense of coexistence of both Japanese and contemporary motifs. In Murakami’s case, his activities are not limited to painting. He works in a remarkably broad range of fields including performances such as Shinjuku Youth Art (in which Miran Fukuda also took part), traditional Japanese-style painting, and dolls. One of his motifs, DOB, is almost as almost familiar as a cartoon character and Murakami has acquired a “registered trademark” for it and is even producing character goods.

  Murakami’s method of work is quite unique. He has founded his own workshop, Hiropon Factory, which is like a medieval painting workshop or a group studio producing animated cartoons, and deligates the production to assistants belonging there. Although Murakami himself does the sketch and gives detailed instructions about the production, and, admitting that the Japanese-style “flat” image he aims to achieve requires skillful technique and time, such method of production has probably been chosen as an antithesis of modernism.

  Not only Murakami but Fukuda also makes use of nihonga formats in some of her works. However, Makoto Aida’s approach to nihonga differs from these two artists. Aida acknowledges himself as a skillful painter and is astonishingly faithful to the techniques and materials established by his predecessors. Be it Japanese-style, Western-style, or even an amateur painting like those painted by schoolchildren in art class, once he has selected a format, Aida fits himself perfectly into it. To him, what is important is “what to paint” and the estrangement existing between the subject and the format while swimming around in various formats that can be selected as desired.

  In his War Painting (senso-ga) Returns series, he makes screens out of “battle pieces”, which were executed during World War 2 and have purposely been ignored. He has also done Valley of Bush Warblers, in which so-called “pink” fliers used to advertise the sex industry are substituted for the pink of the cherry blossoms. There is always an ill-minded dissociation between the format and the content in Aida’s paintings.

  Nihonga, which is a format intended for the portrayal of the beauties of nature and picturesque landscapes, and “art lessons”, which are required in the school curriculum, are formats which Aida chose in order to draw the viewer’s attention towards the systems that everyone accepts without any criticism. Yukiko Okada’s Pavement is a series of 16 works depicting the pavement onto which a leading talent, Yukiko Okada, jumped down and committed suicide in 1986. It is done in an Impressionistic manner alluding to Monet’s haystacks and water lilies, which change in appearance as time passes by. There is a gap between a certain sense of respect that Aida seems to have for technique and style and the subjects he chooses, which appear to be irrelevant to the style of his paintings. Perhaps that gap represents his feeling of ambivalence towards painting.

  Taro Chiezo studied cinematics at New York University and his paintings and installations reflect a highly cinematic temperament and his interest in the media.

  Taro has referred to his interest in artificial life on several occasions and has devised new creatures such as a bananalamb and a calf-engine, which are mixtures of machines and animals, as if to imply the future in which an artificial life will be composed of machinery. In Robots Fall in Love / or Not, torsos without a head, arms, or legs, are crawling around in vain giving an “uncanny” impression in spite of their “cuteness”. By purposely incorporating kitsch images such as idols, dolls dressed in frills, and characters that appear in comics, Taro is criticizing the unfailing desire for consumption in the modern society. Imaginary Mountains portrays part of a robot, which seems to be a cartoon character, and a familiar view of mountains in an intentionally coarse touch. By juxtaposing two totally irrelevant elements, even what we are accustomed to are turned into “uncanny” objects.

  It is hard to clarify the charm of Yoshitomo Nara’s œuvre. The reason is that his paintings are straightforward and amiable at a glance and yet, these seems to be something beyond that. It is always the weak, children or stray cats and dogs, that he depicts. Moreover, they are clearly injured, holding a knife as if to suggest that something evil has taken place, or portrayed with a rope to hang themselves. The background is no more than a spread of monotonous colour that hardly provides any explanation of the circumstances so that you could make up any kind of story using your imagination. The friendly and simple images he paints are like cartoon characters but they are actually portrayals of the pain lying at the basis of human existence, which requires us to live on despite knowing of the innocent bygone moment captured in the picture. Yet, the children Nara depicts do not simply represent the weak. Although they appear weak, they cast an upward glance towards us as if they have some trick or other in mind. Besides innocence, Nara also implies the cruelty that can be caused by such innocence.

  The charm of Nara’s works lies in the emotions his works are capable of scooping up and the potential of opening up different layers of communication depending on who the viewer is.

II.Painterly Factors

Compared to the Simulationist and Neo Pop artists, although their ideas differ in direction, Takanobu Kobayashi and Naofumi Maruyama are both artists that deal with problems that exist inside painting.

  Maruyama started out doing abstract paintings in which proliferating images were depicted without reference to the motif. The wavering images blotted onto the cotton canvas with stencils remind us of the microcosm we find by looking at a laboratory dish through a microscope. Maruyama was winning esteem already in the late 1980s as a legitimate successor of modernism. However, his expression gradually changed from abstraction to figuration. In Leek and Open Date, he depicts figurative images of objects that actually exist in his everyday life. In a series of his friends’ faces, the contour and the features are all that we can recognize in the vacant image that surfaces on the canvas. The nonexistence of the details paradoxically leads to the existence of photography.

  Takanobu Kobayashi chooses motifs that are personally significant in his daily life such as a dog, pillow, goldfish, hand holding chopsticks, or microwave oven. If the environment surrounding his lifestyle changes, the subject he depicts changes accordingly. Surrounded in maldistributed and unroutine light within the image Kobayashi depicts, these everyday and commonplace motifs are radiant with a sense that they are existing as objects.

  Although the submarine Kobayashi painted early on as a self-portrait was highly symbolic, by 1995, in Beehive, he depicted bees dancing boisterously in the light together with a beehive and established a style of his own. Most of the subjects Kobayashi paints are perfectly commonplace images. Perhaps he adheres to the everydayness as a sign of distrust of meta-concepts or simulacra such as “religion” and “philosophy”.

III.Towards a Utopia

With the exception of Fukuda and Murakami, most of the artists featured in this exhibition established their own styles in the 1990s. In Nobuhiko Nukata’s case, prior to 1995, he was producing abstract paintings in line with modernism. It so happens that Nukata, Nara, and Kobayashi were all studying at Aichi Prefectural University of Art around the same period. From circa 1995, Nukata gradually began to discover a style of his own. The works he presented in 1995 demonstrate signs of his style in which Junglegym-like geometric forms are painted freehandedly against a monotonous background. As the titles suggest, the original motif in his works was the Junglegym, which he then converted at will to achieve his current style. At first sight, his works bear a close resemblance to Op Art. Nevertheless, his interest is to be focused more on the decorativeness of painting in a broad sense of the meaning including free play of the lines and the relationship between figure and ground. Although this kind of play is a factor that has been eliminated by Minimalists and the Formalists, in Nukata’s case, complemented by a harmony of subtle colour tone, it is effective in inviting the viewer into the work.

  Paintings by Yoshitaka Echizenya also exhibit a sense of play. Having passed through Simulationism, his sense of pictorial play is focused in a direction that differs completely from Nukata. From the 1980s to the early 1990s, Echizenya was paining in a quasi-classical style quoting medieval European religious paintings, classical Chinese and Japanese landscape paintings and Ainu patterns originating in his hometown, Hokkaido. He rearranged what he quoted from paintings of all ages and countries and wiped out the meanings that had inevitably accumulated in each painting to create a unique pattern composed of figure and ground.

  Afunpar [The Ainu word for the gate of other world] (1993) was painted during the period of transition and is highly comprehensive in that all kinds of elements are mixed to create a visionary world or utopia as indicated by the title. After he created this work, his motifs became all the more simple and repetitive. His colours also changed from a bright and glamorous palette to a key tone of blue, dull green, or brown as if to connect the sky and sea surrounding an island. The post-modernistic excess is restored to the question of the decorativeness required for a painting to exist.

IV. The Joy of Painting

How can a painting attract the viewer’s attention? As demonstrated by the artists presented in this exhibition, there are many different ways to do so. However, they all share a common aim in that they are endeavoring to establish the fertility that painting possesses as a form. The object of “attracting the viewer’s attention” could be a characteristic signifying the potential of a new synthetic experience in which the restriction and discrimination supplied in a museum or particular space are overcome and even the framework of “art” is transcended. This is possible because painting is “open” to everything and that is indeed where the joy of painting exists.

                                     (translated by Kikuko Ogawa)