On the Method of Description, and the Window That Should Be Opened
Ayumi Watanabe
Colored lines carved into a sheet of white paper. While the composition of the image is rigorously structured, it remains cheerful and open, reminiscent of a child's innocent drawing. However, we must quickly recall that artworks which can be described as “childlike” are, in every case, the crystallization of self-discipline and tireless training.
Take, for instance, the 2022 work Ko/u/bo. The brown in the foreground, which stretches horizontally across the canvas, likely symbolizes the earth; the green in the background, the mountains; and the red, drawn diagonally, perhaps the beams of light shining between the ridges. As Nobuyuki Kobayashi points out, the composition of lines and negative space suggests a connection to the calligraphic arts—an association that the artist himself is strongly aware of. In other words, one perceives a consciousness of the “in-between,” where meaning and form arise through bodily motion.¹
Yet, when viewing Tokuro Kojima’s recent works, one senses a kind of surprise or hesitation that transcends such interpretation. It is a sense of disorientation stemming from the fact that, despite the artist identifying as a “Nihonga painter,” his work resists categorization into East/West or Nihonga/contemporary art binaries. Hiroko Kato, who curated the 2006 exhibition No Border: From “Nihonga” / Toward “Nihonga” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, identified certain tendencies shared by the participating artists, such as: “various elements traditionally inherited from Japanese painting—namely, blank space, lines, poetic sentiment, the Japanese landscape, and subjects like tigers or Mount Fuji.”²
Indeed, Kojima’s depiction of a fleeting moment when light pierces the mountains, rendered through a balance of line and space, may well be located within that tradition of Nihonga as Kato describes it. At the same time, however, one glimpses a more interdisciplinary attitude embedded in the work.
“It doesn’t matter whether one paints in the Japanese or Western style. There’s no essential difference between the two,” said Morikazu Kumagai.³ Known for his oil paintings of small, familiar creatures—bugs, flowers, cats—rendered with both affection and an analytical, almost scientific eye, Kumagai surprisingly first studied Nihonga in his youth. After entering the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, he shifted his focus to oil painting and ceased producing Nihonga works. Around 1940, however, he resumed making Nihonga again. This period coincides with a transition in his work: from expressionist compositions where blobs of paint are vigorously placed, to paintings marked by a strong awareness of color fields and his distinctive red contour lines. Some have suggested that his use of red outlines—his signature style—may have been influenced by his training in Nihonga, where the use of line is highly valued.⁴
However, as Mika Kuraya has discussed from various perspectives, Kumagai studied not only Japanese painting but also Western art of his time with great diligence, and many of his works openly reveal influences from the Nabis, cloisonnism, and fauvism.⁵ When we view Kumagai’s work, what we must not forget is his attitude of freely adopting whatever techniques were necessary at the time, without being bound by binary oppositions such as Nihonga/Yōga (Western-style painting), or Japan/the West.
That said, as Hisashi Ishizaki has pointed out, if we classify Kumagai as a Western-style painter, then his Nihonga works are reduced to a mere supplement. On the other hand, if, as his collector Teizo Kimura hoped, we regard Nihonga as the very essence of Kumagai’s oeuvre, then the historical narrative of modern Japanese art must shift significantly.⁶
Unlike Kumagai, Kojima first studied oil painting before turning to Nihonga. Looking across his body of work, one sees how he has always tried to capture—within the flat plane of painting—the moment when something emerges or is about to emerge. To do this, he has employed a wide variety of materials and mediums, including pencil, mineral pigments, cut paper, and at one point even slender metal sculptures made of iron or brass.
Yet the strange sense of uncertainty one feels when encountering his work may stem from the fact that his intense inquiry into form has led him to cross various categorical boundaries, thereby detaching the work from the social contexts associated with those categories. Whether consciously or unconsciously, Kojima seems to have arrived at his methods and references by drawing them toward the “something” he seeks to give form to. This transgressive quality differs from the chimera-like attitude of modern and contemporary Japanese artists who sublimated foreign cultures and expressions into edited, sampled hybrids that simultaneously shaped their own visual languages and offered social critique.⁷
How should a work be connected to society—or not? Who is the subject that describes it? In our time, where the patriarchal historical narrative that has shaped art, along with its categorical frameworks, is increasingly being called into question, there are surely multiple ways to describe “Nihonga” anew. So long as the work remains open to the outside.
Ayumi Watanabe — Special Research Fellow, The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto / Contemporary Art
Notes
¹ Nobuyuki Kobayashi, “Icon/Interval/World: The Form of Tokuro Kojima,” flyer for Tokuro Kojima Exhibition, Ueno Royal Museum Gallery, 2014.
² Hiroko Kato, “No Border: From ‘Nihonga’ / Toward ‘Nihonga’,” in No Border: From “Nihonga” / Toward “Nihonga” [Exhibition Catalog], Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2006, p.11.
³ Hiroyuki Kanahara, “The Background of Morikazu Kumagai’s Nihonga,” in Morikazu Kumagai: Shape of Life Beyond the World, [Exhibition Catalog], Gifu Prefectural Museum of Art, 2004, pp.132–134.
⁴ See, for example, Mika Kuraya, “The Mystery of Morikazu, Part II: Drawing the Red Line,” in Morikazu Kumagai: The Joy of Life, [Exhibition Catalog], National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo / Ehime Prefectural Museum of Art, 2017–18, pp.104–105; Hisashi Ishizaki, “Teizo Kimura and Morikazu Kumagai,” in The Place Where Morikazu Is, Kyuryudo, pp.204–215.
⁵ Refer to the essays in Morikazu Kumagai: The Joy of Life, op. cit.
⁶ Ishizaki, op. cit.
⁷ Naoko Seki, “The Laughter and Melancholy of the Chimera,” in Weavers of a Hundred Years: Modern and Contemporary Art in Flux in Japan, [Exhibition Catalog], Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2019, pp.8–14.
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