On Creation 　2012/11/27

I first decided to pursue nihonga (literally, Japanese style painting) after encountering natural pigments and ink while in junior high school. Nihonga is a form of painting that analyses and expresses Japanese art, forms of expression, culture, and the spirit of the Japanese people from a variety of angles. With this idea in mind, I use the things that I feel in my daily life as inspiration for creatingnihonga.

Instead of rejecting foreign cultures, Japan has a long history of absorbing and merging those cultures in order to update and produce a kind of hybrid from them. The culture of tea is a perfect example of this.

Tarō Okamoto lamented that Japanese art contained nothing unique, and searching for something truly original in Japanese art, arrived all the way back at Jōmon Pottery. However, the original Japanese were people who traveled over from the Asian continent to present day Japan with no concept of "Japan," and therefore I think that it is obvious that there is nothing that you could call one of a kind. Rather than thinking of Japanese art to be lacking in originality, I think of the culture cultivated through thousands of years of absorbing and merging foreign cultures until they were sublimated into something completely different. In that mentality of the Japanese, I feel a great sense of individuality.

Just as in the connection between master and apprentice where the apprentice carries on the form of expression of the teacher, the Japanese excel at taking in everything in order to create something that transcends the original. With that idea in mind, my goal is to learn from the past in order to produce something new.

To explain in a little more detail, there are two essential parts to this.

The first is that I can look over the various schools that came into being after the Muromachi period (1392–­1573), such as the Kanō and Tosa schools, the Rimpa and Ukiyo-e schools later on, and even in the lineage of apprenticeship that still exists today or the schools whose lineage have come to an end as sources of inspiration, and find potential avenues for advancement in my own work.

Then, from the research into these various forms of expression, I can continue my pursuit into the kind of artwork that I can create to bring expression to the future of Japan and the world.

These two aspects continuously interlace and are closely intertwined, and it is a struggle as an artist to create amidst these parallel processes.

As Samuel Huntington wrote in his Clash of Civilizations, the Japanese were raised in an exceptionally blessed civilization. It is a rare civilization in the world, where the colors are not black and white, but a range of simultaneously existing colors from which we are free to create. In my work, I am constantly looking to find my own, shining, new color within that rainbow.

On Nihonga 　2012/11/27

According to art historians, nihonga was a new term and concept created during the Meiji period (1868 - 1912), and it is different to the Japanese painting of the Edo period (1603 - 1868). Actual history, however, is neither a progression or regression from what came before, but is formed through the continuous succession of moments in time, and is brought about as the result of the process of perpetual transformation and renewal.

When talking about the change in eras, art historians conveniently explain that one day, in this month and year, the Edo period ended and the Meiji period began. In reality, though, history is nothing but the process of the internal and conscious transformation and renewal that occurs within the people who lived at that time.

Even if the whole structure of society were to suddenly change, as it did after World War II, people carry on with their lives.

I have had two experiences that allowed me to experience this first hand.

The first occurred while I was helping to manage the personal library of a painter who lived before, during, and just after World War II. Until then, I had only recognized his name and his artworks as words that might appear in a textbook. However, when I actually took part in helping to manage the personal library of this artist, I saw the annotations and underlined passages in his books, and I realized that his name and works were not simply entries in the history of art, but were the name and works of an actual person who lived and struggled through the changing eras.

Even well-known artists in the history of art lived their lives as individuals, creating their art while attempting to carry on with their lives through the various changes in society. I realized that this person was not simply an entry in a textbook, but a living, breathing human being.

The second experience occurred when I visited the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery at Meiji Jingu Gaien.

The gallery was completed in the first year of the Shōwa period (1926) and houses 80 works – 40 works of both nihonga and western paintings from artists of that era. When I went to see the artworks there, I learned that nihonga was connected by an unbroken chain to the various schools of the Edo period such as the Maruyama-Shijō, Kanō, Nanga or Bunjinga, and Ukiyo-e schools, and was a synthesis of them all. (I think that the reason that the gallery is lacking in influences from the Rimpa school is because the school was comparatively less popular at the time when the gallery was created.) However, after carefully scrutinizing the technique of each artist, I felt no disconnect from the Edo period styles. In each artist, I could clearly make out the strong influences of the various schools that had persisted since the Edo period.

Ryōtarō Shiba pointed out that during the Edo period – the most powerful era of the shogunate system of governance – Ryōma Sakamoto was the first to envision a national state known as Japan. During the process of modernization, a synthesizing of the various schools of Japanese painting into a term known as nihonga occured. Styles of painting such as the Nanga school mentioned above whose classification as nihonga have since been rejected were also combined within this synthesis. But while this synthesis might have been taking place in the history of art, the same can not be said to have been taking place within the individual artists of that age themselves, whose styles were so colored by the various schools under which they had learned.

Fast forward 100 years, and those of us living in the current Heisei period (1989 to the present) find ourselves in a position where we can look out across this history from a bird’s eye view. Nihonga is the synthesis of the schools of Japanese painting up to the Edo period. Just like the culture of my country, nihonga is a form of painting that expresses the soul of the Japanese people by absorbing and combining everything that came before to create a new future.

I want to rethink about nihonga, not from the structural concerns of the art historian, but from the technical and creative issues of the artist. Living in this modern age allows us to learn about the various perspectives of the various schools of Japanese painting without being bound to a single, particular style, leaving us free to create works ofnihonga that truly embody the real Japan.

That is exactly why I believe that there is value now in thinking about Japan when creating nihonga.