Pictographs / In-Between / World — The Formative Art of Tokuro Kojima
Nobuyuki Kobayashi
Writing is a vessel that contains a pre-existing system of language—a visual form in which self-identical meanings (signifieds) are fixed. It is a device that, as a shared sign (signifier) among members of a community, anchors and perpetuates thought in linguistic form.
Inscribed on oracle bones or written by hand, characters appear in diverse manifestations, always imbued with infinite displacements. Yet we habitually abstract away each individual visual form, focusing only on the meaning behind it. Our gaze disregards the material differences of each instance, discards the corporeal trace of the hand, and treats writing as if it were a transparent medium. As writing evolved from oracle bone script to stone inscriptions, handwritten forms, and finally to print, this transparency has only deepened.
It is said that characters originated from pictographs—symbols modeled after objects already segmented by human meaning from the natural world. While other pictographic systems like Egyptian hieroglyphs or Mayan script either evolved into phonetic systems or disappeared entirely, it is perhaps astonishing that only Chinese characters have preserved a complex and fertile symbolic system that persists today, capable even of expressing contemporary philosophical thought. Indeed, we modern users need not consciously reflect on the origins of Chinese characters or the layers of cultural sediment that support the typographic culture. For most of us, Chinese characters function merely as signs. Nonetheless, we must not forget that Chinese characters—especially their pictographic archetypes—retain the memory of their birth within their very forms.
As Shinji Shirakawa’s Jitō (Character Dictionary) reveals, the pictographs of Chinese characters possess symbolic elements derived from a wide array of natural and artificial phenomena, and each character originates in magic or ritual. The system of Chinese characters as pictographs embodied a world steeped in the magical.
Surely by the time humans painted on cave walls and learned to replicate the shapes of things, they had already segmented objects and actions semantically, claiming linguistic communication as their own. Yet the act of “representing” through writing must be understood as a fundamentally different experience from either manipulating spoken language or depicting images.
Standing before the series of works by Tokuro Kojima that began in the 1990s, I sensed a formative power that evokes this primordial, distinct experience. Kojima’s aim, it seems, is to approach from the realm of painting that ancient ambiguity of écriture—a primal space in which meaning and image, language and embodiment, co-arise. In this liminal space—in this “in-between”—a double experience emerges. I believe it is here that Kojima seeks to reconstruct, to internalize, and to recall through his canvases the essence of that experience.
This is also supported by Kojima’s clear awareness of calligraphy as an art form. He is deeply conscious of the “sense of calligraphy that runs through East Asian painting,” and with this cultural tradition as a foundation, he seeks to construct an unparalleled world of form. He regards “the constructiveness and abstraction seen in calligraphy” as the structural core of his own artistic expression (from his 2011 solo exhibition catalog).
Calligraphy itself can be seen as a practice that reorients attention toward characters—their primitivity, symbolism, and magical nature—and continually reiterates them. Each iteration, through the motion of the hand, its corporeality, and the materiality and chance of brush and ink, evokes meaning while simultaneously returning us to the origin of écriture.
According to Koji Fukunaga, the essence of calligraphy in China lies in its mimesis of the cosmic principles of nature. In this view, calligraphy is not merely a technique but a method—an act of joining with the cosmic processes of creation using brush and ink, an embodiment of “the mysterious existence of nature,” as Sun Guoting described it in Shupu (Treatise on Calligraphy). It is a means of expressing nature’s laws through human agency on paper or silk (Fukunaga Koji, Chinese Philosophy, Religion, and Art, Jinbun Shoin, 1988, p. 175). In this sense, calligraphy and painting were seen, as Zhang Yanyuan wrote in Lidai Minghua Ji (Records of Famous Painters of Successive Dynasties), as “different in name but one in essence.”
Based on these principles, I propose three major focal points to interpret Kojima’s paintings, which are grounded in the formative logic of calligraphy: line, color, and title.
First, the constructiveness of the line. At the origin of Kojima’s formative activity lies a desire to “engrave” lines onto the canvas, generating a solid, abstract, and architectural space. He is acutely aware that these sculptural lines resonate with calligraphy and are characteristic of Nihonga (traditional Japanese painting). His awareness of line even holds the potential for expansion into three-dimensionality; indeed, in recent years, Kojima has produced numerous sculptural works using iron wires like thread.
Next, color. Here, color is not something that confronts line and form, but rather signifies the materiality of mineral pigments. In other words, the use of color does not dissolve the painting into mere visuality, nor does it allow line and form to vanish. Rather, what is at stake is color as surface—color that permeates the engraved line, integrates with it, and retains the texture of a physical substance.
Finally, the title. Kojima reportedly conceives his titles only after completing his paintings or sculptures. This suggests that his works do not end with form alone, but rather sink deeper into language. Titles such as Kyū / Kō (2007), Yu / To / Ma (2007), Mi / Me / Tsu (2008), En / I (2011), and Go / Kai / Zai (2011) suggest “the layered time rolling about in search of unseen orders within the canvas” (Tokuro Kojima, “Thoughts on Titles,” 2008). This, too, echoes the earlier-mentioned pursuit concerning pictographs—an attempt to repeatedly evoke that primordial landscape where naming and meaning emerge as characters.
Tokuro Kojima’s method—having found the structure of his formative world within calligraphy—charts a course “in between” meaning and image, mind and body, language and matter. Like the first person to carve a character onto an oracle bone, what he persistently seeks is to play with signs, images, and meanings—and to encounter, through that play, the site of their origin.
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