TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/073189/07318900.018

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.1 KB | 115 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 68

No More Tributes to Mount Fuji


A Japanese show explodes Western preconceptions

By Edward M. Gomez


    For centuries, a deeply rooted appreciation of nature has
played a central role in the spiritual and cultural life of
Japan. Japanese artists traditionally reflected this reverence
not in intellectual abstractions but concretely, in highly
stylized representations of specific rivers, mountains, plants
and animals. As in other aspects of Japanese thought and
behavior, artists were expected to remain respectful of the past
and concentrate on certain well-established forms and
techniques. But during the Meiji era (1868-1912), modernism was
introduced from the West, knocking major dents in this rigid
system with an emphasis on innovation, individualism and the
search for new forms. Japanese artists, emulating European easel
painting, began to produce portraits and still lifes in oil --
new subjects in a new medium. Later in the 20th century and
especially after World War II, some continued to keep up with
modernism's evolutionary twists and turns through surrealism and
paint-splashing abstract expressionism.

    Now a valuable and timely exhibition at the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art demonstrates just how much further Japan's
children of the postwar "economic miracle" have gone in
breaking the old rules. "Against Nature: Japanese Art in the
Eighties" affords American audiences an overdue opportunity to
examine some 30 paintings, sculptures and mixed-media works made
by nine artists age 40 or younger, plus one artists' collective.
The first major U.S. museum showing of new art from Japan in
nearly two decades, the exhibition was organized by Thomas
Sokolowski of New York University's Grey Art Gallery and Study
Center and Kathy Halbreich, formerly of M.I.T.'s List Visual
Arts Center, along with Fumio Nanjo of the Institute of
Contemporary Arts in Nagoya, Japan, and Shinji Kohmoto of the
National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto. It will run in San
Francisco through Aug. 6, then travel to Akron, Boston, Seattle,
Cincinnati, New York City and Houston through early 1991.

    The survey will probably blast many viewers' assumptions
about what Japanese art should look like. Forget about tributes
to Mount Fuji or poetic evocations of the changing seasons.
These members of what one Japanese critic has called "the
post-Hiroshima generation" have grown up in a technology-driven,
fiercely consumerist, information-saturated urban setting far
removed, spiritually if not physically, from Mother Nature. They
are city dwellers accustomed at cherry-blossom time each year
to seeing decorative artificial flowers attached to electric
poles -- right next to real trees. Those based in Tokyo, for
example, would be hard-pressed to find any sizable patches of
green in the neon-drenched, congested concrete megalopolis that
sprawls around their tiny studios. All of the featured artists'
works, in subject matter as well as execution, not only defy
tradition but in some cases tear it to shreds.

    "I'm an urban creature; the countryside frightens me," says
Kyoto-born Noboru Tsubaki, whose Fresh Gasoline, 1989, a
9-ft.-high bulbous yellow pod, is the most startling work in the
show. The creepy beauty and rich surface texture of Tsubaki's
monstrous blob, with tentacle-like branches sprouting from its
top, recall a fascination with the grotesque that characterized
some Japanese avant-garde art of the 1950s and early '60s. Its
inspiration: Japan's bombed-out landscape after World War II.
Strains of this extreme aesthetic are still visible today in the
ghoulish makeup and gestures of butoh dancers. Similarly, Shoko
Maemoto creates souvenirs from a nightmare alley where
fairy-tale fantasy meets a haunting eroticism. Meticulously
executed, her work has a grisly elegance, as in Silent
Explosion, 1988, a mannequin-less burlap hoopskirt from which
a torrent of "blood" cascades, blazing, to the floor.

    Other artists in the show use the real world as raw
material. Charred, rough-edged and yellowed, Shinro Ohtake's
mixed-media assemblages and collage-filled scrapbooks seek an
awkward beauty in combinations of found objects and unwanted
rubbish. Such pieces as his Family Tree, 1986-88, serve as vivid
symbols of the appropriationist free-for-all that is Japanese
pop culture today -- a tsunami of Mickey Mouse trinkets,
teriyaki burgers, Picasso calendars, Swatches and more. They are
also dispassionate records of life in what Ohtake calls an
"information supermarket," an environment in which traditional
Japanese cultural values are up for grabs, along with everything
else.

    This includes Western art history and aspects of Japan's
own cultural past. Osaka native Yasumasa Morimura, for example,
places himself as the main character in carefully staged and
photographed "reproductions" of well-known Western paintings
like Manet's Olympia. Tomiaki Yamamoto melds brushy abstract
expressionism with the pattern-oriented design sensibility of
traditional Japanese textiles. Often his splashy tableaux
resemble spread-out kimonos. Typically, as in Untitled, 1985,
they are covered with an obsessive, all-over rash of heavily
impastoed, drippy dots. Far less theatrical but also keenly
focused on subject matter and technique, sculptor Katsura
Funakoshi creates blank-faced portraits of everyday people whose
looks betray neither race nor nationality. Made from
camphorwood, his torsos are as skillfully carved as the ancient
Buddhist sculptures whose construction they recall.
Psychologically intense, they are also a little bit spooky.

    Ultimately, even without the thematic weight imposed on
these works by the somewhat arbitrary title "Against Nature,"
this is very much an exhibition about Japanese artists'
continuing tug-of-war with the forces of modernism. Its
organizers obviously believe that, in responding to the world
around them, today's Japanese artmakers are answering to a
personal, not a prescribed, vision of how to depict it. Perhaps,
in a modern world, this approach is only natural.