<p><span style=""></span></p><p><span style=""></span></p><p>Insights, dedicated to art from the Asia-Pacific region, features artists whose works illuminate the plurality of Japanese art practices over the last sixty years</p>

Taro Nettleton

Exploring Japanese art histories at Art Basel Hong Kong

<p>At the Insights sector at Art Basel Hong Kong, a series of presentations foreground Japanese art practices from the 1960s onwards which are united by their critical exploration of formal, psychological, and social boundaries. </p><p><a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/22510/Kotaro-Nukaga">KOTARO NUKAGA</a>’s presentation pairs works by feminist video art pioneer Mako Idemitsu (b. 1940) with those of contemporary painter Tomona Matsukawa (b. 1987). Idemitsu’s videos are a crucial part of the genealogy of Japanese feminist art, and this presentation offers a precious opportunity to contemplate the female experience in Japan’s ‘miraculous growth’ and ‘bubble economy’ eras. A Tokyo native, Idemitsu graduated from Waseda University before going on to study at Columbia University, New York in 1963, spending the next ten years in the US making films. Notably, in 1972, she documented ‘Womanhouse’, a collaborative installation and performance space created by artist educators&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/36821/Miriam-Schapiro" target="_blank">Miriam Schapiro</a> and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/20163/Judy-Chicago" target="_blank">Judy Chicago</a> along with their students in the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of Arts.</p>

<p>Idemitsu established the tone of her art practice with her first video work, <em>What a Woman Made </em>(1973), which combines deadpan humor with unflinching observations of misogyny in everyday Japanese life. Blurry black-and-white video footage of a tampon swimming in a toilet bowl is accompanied by the sound of a male physician announcing the birth of a girl. The voice goes on to prescribe how children should be raised according to their gender, concluding that ‘A man is noble and strong; a woman is mean and weak. This is divine truth.’ Later video works, informed by Jungian psychological theory, often feature a video monitor within the video that represents repressed memories and other unconscious materials. Styling that resembles the visual aesthetics of a television drama creates an acerbic tone when combined with the subject matter: female experience, particularly mothers and wives in a rigidly heteronormative and misogynist world. <em>Kiyoko’s Situation</em> (1989) shows the titular artist turned housewife plagued by the demands of her parents, husband, and mother-in-law to be a good wife and mother and give up her painting practice. Driven to binge drinking, she finally ends her life. Excepting the suicide, the situation paralleled the artist’s own. ‘Making my own artwork depends on how much housework I can skip,’ Idemitsu wrote eight years earlier.</p>

<p>The presence of the monitor and an inner voice that haunts Kiyoko in nearly all the scenes showing her carrying out everyday actions, represents the coexistence of interior and exterior space within the same, albeit split, human subject. That the weight of heteronormativity, as applied by Kiyoko’s family, remains harrowingly unchanged in Japan today can be gleaned from Matsukawa’s photorealist oil paintings. Dramatically lit in chiaroscuro and painted to evoke glossy photo prints, the closely cropped images capture everyday gestures that reference the challenges and violence that women face as they are routinely reduced to gendered and sexed identities. <em>Nevertheless, I am a Mother </em>(2018) depicts an extreme close-up of a woman’s face and hands as her ringed fingers secure a pearl earring to her ear. The realism of Matsukawa’s paintings is supported by interviews she conducts with female peers in Japan, extending each work’s confrontation with the boundary between apparent and lived reality. </p>

<p><a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/30606/Kenjiro-Okazaki" target="_blank">Kenjiro Okazaki</a>’s work, presented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2213/Takuro-Someya-Contemporary-Art" target="_blank">Takuro Someya Contemporary Art</a>, shares a concern, albeit a formal one, with the boundaries between inside and outside. Born in 1955, Okazaki promotes openness and plurality with his prolific output of small abstract tableau paintings partially bounded by unique frames – broken up, the artist explains, to let the breeze pass through. Their openness, he contends, allows the painting to exit into the world and the world to enter the painting. Quickly painted (apparently composed with fewer than 10 brushed applications of paint) in colorful, thick impasto smeared onto canvas supports, their diminutive scale and simplicity are belied by their assertive material presence. In his award-winning book <em>Abstract Art as Impact </em>(2018), Okazaki links abstraction to the invisible and an interest in the occult and spiritual shared by pioneers of modernist abstraction. In all cases, he argues, an interest in giving form to real but formless internal material enabled the development of abstract art – another negotiation between inside and out. </p>

<p>Presented alongside Okazaki’s paintings, and providing a vital link between pre- and postwar avant-garde art movements such as Mavo and Mono-ha (School of Things), are works by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8991/Yoshishige-Saito" target="_blank">Yoshishige Saito</a> (1904–2001). Saito taught most of the artists associated with Mono-ha at Tama Art University, where he radically opposed ideas of self-expression and illusionism. His plywood pieces showcased by Takuro Someya Contemporary Art date from the 1930s. Destroyed by the US fire-bombing of Tokyo during World War II and reproduced in 1970, most of them are painted in lacquer in black, white, and gray and feature playfully abstract, geometric, and organic forms in relief. Effectively undulating in and out of frame to share the exhibition space with the viewer, Saito’s relief work was famously rejected from the 18th Nika Art Association Exhibition in 1931 as it could be labeled neither painting nor sculpture. His provocative questioning of medium specificity espoused by Western modernist critics, is one of the keys for understanding postwar Japanese art.</p>

<p>Extending the line of inquiry set forth by Saito a generation earlier are works by Shigeyuki Cho (1935–2019)&nbsp;presented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/9760/rin-art-association" target="_blank">rin art association</a>. On view at Art Basel Hong Kong are pieces from Cho’s ‘Shi-sho’ (Thalamus) series, which similarly troubled the conventional categories of painting and sculpture. Made with Styrofoam and acrylic paint on wood, these mostly hard-edge, monochromatic, abstract painted compositions – designed to be hung on the wall or laid on the floor – appear to be cut apart and pieced back together like puzzled architectural details.</p>

<p>Born around one decade after Cho in 1944 was&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/9830/Susumu-Koshimizu" target="_blank">Susumu Koshimizu</a>, whose sculptural and relief works are featured with&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/32258/Yod-Gallery" target="_blank">YOD Gallery</a> at Insights. Koshimizu attended some of Saito’s lectures at Tama Art University and became a studio assistant to Saito after graduation, helping him recreate some of Saito’s works destroyed during the war. A radical rejoinder to the riotous, rambunctious ‘Anti-Art’ practices of the 1960s, which deployed discarded mass-produced materials as well as the performing body to blur distinctions between art and life, Koshimizu and his Mono-ha-associated peers aimed to reveal the substance of their materials, without imposing their ego or expression onto them. Koshimizu’s <em>From Surface to Surface </em>(1971) and <em>Relief - From Surface to Surface </em>(2018), for example, are composed of wood planks, 3 meters tall in the former and 57 cm high in the latter, cut into different shapes and at varying angles, which expose their complex and polysemous essence.</p>

<p>The unsettled relationship between what we see and understand is explored in&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/21956/Yuko-Mohri" target="_blank">Yuko Mohri</a>’s 2023 sound installation <em>Decomposition</em>, presented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/18751/Yutaka-Kikutake-Gallery" target="_blank">Yutaka Kikutake Gallery</a>. Electrodes are insertedinto fruits to measure levels of moisture within. The collected data is used to generate sound, turning the process of decomposition into a method of automatic composition that evokes the avant-garde composer&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/10581/John-Cage" target="_blank">John Cage</a> and his use of compositional elements such as radio programs and silence. Not to mention the history of European still life painting, illuminating the interior life of inanimate fruit and reflecting on the impermanence of life.</p>

<p>But the smell of Mohri’s work might trigger another historical reference point in the right visitor. In 1963, the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, the primary annual exhibition for the 1960s avant-garde, prohibited six types of works, two of which were ‘works that emit loud or unpleasant sounds’ and ‘works that release unpleasant odors or are made of perishable material.’ The stipulations were made in reaction to artwork submissions labeled by critic Yoshiaki Tono as ‘Anti-Art’, whose juxtapositions of contrasting materials and spatial interventions constituted an innovative critique of the spectacular culture that informed both avant-garde and mainstream cultural works of the 1960s. One year later, in 1964, the Yomiuri Exhibition was finally terminated, the same year Tokyo hosted the first Olympic Games to be held in Asia. With that, Insights at Art Basel Hong Kong comes full circle, providing an opportunity to take in the diverse range of developments that have populated the postwar Japanese art scene since that landmark year. </p><hr id="horizontalrule" /><p>Taro Nettleton is Associate Professor of Art History at Temple University Japan Campus.</p><p>Published on March 8, 2023.</p><p>Captions for full-bleed images: 1. Tomona Matsukawa,<em> I</em><em> fell asleep again before removing my makeup</em> (detail), 2023. A dark filter was applied over this image for readability. Courtesy of the artist and&nbsp;KOTARO NUKAGA, Tokyo. 2. Tomona Matsukawa,&nbsp;<em style="background-color: initial;">Nevertheless, I am a Mother </em>(detail)<em style="background-color: initial;">,&nbsp;</em>2018. Courtesy of the artist and&nbsp;KOTARO NUKAGA, Tokyo. 3. Susumu Koshimizu,&nbsp;<em style="background-color: initial;">From Surface to Surface</em>, 1971–2022. Courtesy of YOD Gallery, Osaka. 4. Yuko Mohri,&nbsp;<em style="background-color: initial;">Decomposition,</em>&nbsp;2023. Courtesy of Yutaka Kikutake Gallery, Tokyo.</p>

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Insights, dedicated to art from the Asia-Pacific region, features artists whose works illuminate the plurality of Japanese art practices over the last sixty years

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