Cats Purr-vade Japan's History and Culture

The cats of Japan's "Cat Island" await your visit. Via.

From protectors of ancient religious relics to demon cats haunting night travelers to the YouTube and media celebrities of today, cats have an unparalleled place in Japan's history and culture.

First introduced to Japan around 500 A.D., cats instantly proved their worth as guardians of Buddhist temple manuscripts. Mice and other rodents were particularly fond of the parchment used in most documents of the time, so cats were regularly considered both protectors of the home and of valuable books. Cats were often housed in private pagodas in Japan andwere considered so valuable that by the 10th century CE, only the nobility could afford to own them.

As familiarity with cats grew, they became known for more than just their positive attributes--infamous for stealing food and destroying people’s possessions. But in 1602, the number of domestic cats sharply declined after the Japanese government ordered all cats to be released so that they could catch the rats destroying the silkworm industry.

Today cats are everywhere, especially in popular Japanese culture. There’s Kirara from Inuyasha, Maru of YouTube fame, futuristic robot feline Doraemon (named the 2020 Tokyo Olympics ambassador), Luna from Sailor Moon, The Catbus from My Neighbor Totoro, Meowth from Pokemon, travel mascot Nyalan, and Station Master Tama, who not only welcomes tens of thousands of tourists to the Kishi train station in Wakayama, Japan, but reportedly has boosted the local economy by millions of dollars.

Japan’s love of cats extends beyond the realm of fiction and media. At Japanese cat cafes, cat lovers can spend time petting and playing with their favorite animals, all while enjoying a cup of coffee. Owing to strict apartment regulations in Japanese cities, which don't often allow residents to own cats, the cafes have taken off in Japan, where there were nearly 150 as of 2012. The phenomenon has quickly gone global, with London and New York City opening their first cafes in 2014, Lady Dinah's Cat Emporium and Meow Parlour respectively.

Another major cat attraction is Aoshima’s “Cat Island”, one of approximately eleven cat islands in Japan. There, cats outnumber humans six-to-one, as the island is home to just 15 people, mainly elderly fishermen and their wives. The cats get a pretty good deal, free to roam about as they please, with the village nurse there to feed them every day.

Utagawa Kunisada's 1861 illustration for the kabuki play The Spirit of the Cat Stone. Courtesy of the Hiraki Foundation.

Before they took over the internet and peppered the headlines of mainstream news outlets around the world, Japanese cats had a darker more storied life in the country's mythology and folklore.  

In their review of Japan Society's hit exhibition Life of Cats: Selections from the Hiraki Ukiyo-e Collection closing today, The Guardian wrote,  "The paradox between cats’ cute outward appearance and inward capacity for wickedness (or at least sofa destruction) is crucial to their place in Japanese folklore."

The demon cat bakeneko transforms into whatever it wishes, including humans. Tales of lovers and courtesans transforming into cats when they thought no one was watching were popular back in the Edo period (1603-1868), and they are often depicted in art of the era dancing about with a towel or napkin on their heads. According to Hyakumonogatari:

Bakeneko has been rendered in English in a variety of ways. Monster cat. Ghost cat. But the most accurate translation would be “Changing Cat”... for the bakeneko, there is a general scholastic consciences that the legends began with fish. 

Cats are not indigenous to Japan, and the little “hand-fed tigers” were imported in later years and served as house pets and rat-catchers. Most of Japan at the time lived on a diet of vegetables and grains, with very little supplementary meat or protein. Cats were fed leftovers. However, cats are carnivorous. They don’t do well on a diet of vegetables and grains, and when they are hungry they will take their protein where they can get it. And many households had a ready supply, even if they didn’t know it. 

Oil lamps as the time often used rendered fish oil as fuel. To a protein-starved cat this was exactly what they needed, and they would stand on their hind legs to reach up to the lamp to lick out the fish oil. Frightened pet owners looking at the lamplight-cast shadows would see their tiny cat suddenly elongate and stand on two legs as if transforming into a human. Thus was established the connection between bakeneko and shadows.

There’s also the nekomata, a vicious cat that enjoys stalking and attacking humans. During the Kamakura period (1185–1333), tales of nekomata spoke of massive beasts that lurked in the mountains, waiting for unsuspecting travelers – their next meal – to approach. By the Edo period, nekomata were believed to evolve from house cats that had lived for a very long time, fleeing to the mountains when their time came. Once the creature’s tail had split in two, the transformation was complete. 

The nekomata figure prominently in the popular kabuki play The Spirit of the Cat Stone dramatized by Tsuruya Nanboku in the late 19th century, and inspried by a real location. The cat-shaped rock at the Okazaki station (in today’s Shizuoka Prefecture) along the Tōkaidō Road was believed to carry the vengeful spirit of a wrongly killed woman, and would take the form of the nekomata, emerging from an aged cat who grows the tell-tale split-end tail. The nekomata first appears as an old innkeeper greeting travelers who stop to rest in Okazaki, but at night her true nature is revealed as she licks oil from a lantern and her silhouette shows a cat shape, which commands several bakeneko that dance around the intended victims.

On the more fortuitous side of Japanese folklore, is the Maneki Neko, the squat, often smiling cat which often adorns Japanese shops and Asian stores in general. The bright eyed, beckoning statue is said to bring good luck. With a wave of its left paw, it is said to attract customers, while a waving right paw invites good fortune or at least cash. Catster points out a couple of origin stories in their article "5 Interesting Facts About Fortune Cats (Maneki Neko)": 

There are a couple of popular legends about the origins of the Lucky Cat. The first tells of a wealthy man who took shelter from a rainstorm under a tree next to a temple. He noticed a cat that seemed to be beckoning to him, so he followed it inside the temple. Shortly thereafter, lightning struck the tree he had been standing under. Because the cat had saved his life, the man was so grateful, he became a benefactor of the temple and brought it much prosperity. When he passed away, a statue of the cat was made in is honor. 

Another common legend is a really peculiar one. A geisha had a pet cat that she adored. One day, it was tugging at her kimono and the owner of the brothel thought the cat was possessed, so he sliced off its head with a sword. (Yeah, gruesome! No cats were harmed in the writing of this article.) The flying cat head landed on a snake about to strike and the fangs killed the snake and saved the woman. The geisha was so distraught by the loss of her cat that one of her customers made a statue of the cat to cheer her up.

When looking at the cats of ancient and modern Japan, along with the prevailing images and stories of the times, it’s incredible to see how cats have evolved over the ages and maintain their place as one of Japan's favorite animals. For animals not native to Japan, they’ve certainly left their mark throughout its history and culture.

--Mark Gallucci, Japan Society Staff

The Nyan Avengers. From left to right: Station Master Tama, Luna, Maru and Doraemon.

Delight in the Details: A Closer Look at Japan Society's ‘Garden'

Manabu Ikeda's Foretoken.

Whether diabolical or divine, details in art capture (and sometimes overwhelm) the imagination, and can transform a single instant into an hours-long adventure of discovery.

A prime example of this is early Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch's masterpiece Garden of Earthly Delights. According to Taschen’s recently released Hieronymus Bosch: Complete Works, the piece is "populated with grotesque scenes of fantastical creatures succumbing to all manner of human desire, fantasy, and angst… alongside traditional hybrids of man and beast, such as centaurs, and mythological creatures such as unicorns, devils, dragons, and griffins, we also encounter countless mixed creatures freely invented by the artist."

Bosch's thematic complexity, compositional density and artistic playfulness inspired the title of Japan Society Gallery's current exhibition Garden of Unearthly Delights, which showcases three Japanese masters of their craft, or takumi: Manabu Ikeda, Hisashi Tenmyouya, and the collective teamLab, all of whom are creating what the New York Times calls "Japanese art 2.0." 

In the artists' works, "the past, the present, and the future collide creating hallucinatory visions like The Garden of Earthly Delights," writes Director of Japan Society Gallery and exhibition co-curator Miwako Tezuka in the catalogue. "Just as Bosch did, the three Japanese artists allegorically depict urgent cultural and social issues in a manner informed by their contemporary environment—in their case, today’s world of spectacle an information overload."

Spectacle indeed. Though only showing 25 works, Garden of Unearthly Delights encompasses a vast treasure trove of stimulating and subtle wonder, the antithesis to the blaring lights of Times Square or the constant bombardment of advertising from our TVs, mobile devices and almost every surface we encounter on our commutes and travels. 

In honor of the Garden of Unearthly Delights closing today, here are some surprising, thoughtful and/or humorous details visitors may have missed.

Manabu Ikeda is known for the painstaking detail of his work, which often takes more than a year to complete.The exhibition's other co-curator Laura J. Mueller writes, "Ikeda, through the medium of his meticulously executed pen-and-ink drawings, creates dreamlike worlds on his canvas that visually explicate some of the major dilemmas that we face today--such as climate chaos and the resulting natural disasters--questioning mankind's role in both causation and correction."

Meltdown, pictured above, was created in response to Japan's 3/11 earthquake and tsunami. The waste spewing, ice-encrusted industrial plant hovering over an idyllic landscape is a stark commentary of mankind's impact on nature and the potential (or actuality) of cataclysm. To further heighten the tension, pure white silhouettes (a common motif throughout Ikeda's work) of animals appear in and out of their natural habitat, oblivious to the looming man-made disaster.

A giant snake rising in the mist and toadstools buried in the trees dominate Ikeda's Mountain and Clouds, but take a magnifying glass to the bottom right corner to find apparitions haunting the trees. Are these kodama, tree spirits from Japanese folklore, or is this an homage to Japan's tragic Aokigahara forest at the base of Mt. Fuji, also known as "Suicide Forest"?

Visitors entranced by the electric waves of Ikeda's impressionistic and relatively straightforward Imprint may have missed a barely visible torii, the iconic gateways to Japan's Shinto shrines, submerged in the darkest blue of the center stillness. 

A tiny bee and spider hitch a ride on the back of Ikeda's vegetative Grass Mantis.

Some visitors have said they spent hours scouring every inch of Ikeda's breathtaking 780 square foot Foretoken, pictured in full at the top of this article. In this work Ikeda cleverly reverses the kineticism (and perhaps symbolism) of Hokusai's famous The Great Wave at Kanagawa, an obvious source of inspiration. Hokusai's titular wave not only threatens three fishing boats with its awesome, all-consuming momentum, but dwarves the static and typically dominating Mt. Fuji in the background. In Ikeda's work, Mt. Fuji is nowhere to be seen, and the wave, literally frozen in time, is brimming with life, from birth to playful specters of death, as seen in the details above, as well as countless scenes of humorous, imaginative invention.

In not one but two places, skeletons enjoy the aftermath of a plane crash. Note the silhouetted vultures in the second detail enjoying the show.

Homages to icons of Japanese mythology abound like like this dragon and fisherman landing a giant koi (carp) using koinobori as bait.

And finally (but by no means completely) in terms of Ikeda's detail, Tezuka explains the ubiquitous hovering spirits, above, and their poignant meaning for the artist: "The deity riding the flying animal is chanting a Buddhist sutra, in this case 'Namo Amitābhāya' (in Japanese, 南無阿弥陀仏 or Namu Amida Butsu), literally meaning 'Homage to Infinite Light.' There are several such figures in Foretoken, and Ikeda has said that at least one of them was his grandmother when she passed away."

Hisashi Tenmyouya "appropriates imagery and creative techniques from traditional Japanese art, reinterpreting them in a shockingly contemporary manner with references to subjects such as modern warfare and street violence," writes Mueller. "Taking cues from Buddhist themes and imagery, Tenmyouya imbues his art (whether intentionally or subconsciously) with meditative and religious meaning."

Tenmyouya’s iconoclastic Neo Thousand Armed Kannon, above, painted shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S., shows the beloved Buddhist goddess of mercy with her arms splayed behind her, each hand holding a menacing and militaristic gun or knife. Some have seen this piece as purely sacrilegious. But upon closer inspection, two hands at her chest hold something different, almost as an offering: a grenade in her left, and a can of spray paint in her right. Does this represent a possibility for art amidst overwhelming threat of violence? Does it symbolize an imbalance between destructive and creative forces in our world? Is it implying that art is dangerous—for the artist, for the viewer, for the establishment?

Much has been written about the "anti-Zen" garden in Tenmyouya's installation Rhyme, especially how there is no blood spilled in the epic mirrored battle scenes on the wall. The blood, however, has pooled amongst the skull-embossed rocks below, in the form of crimson sand, which was carefully, almost meditatively raked by the artist days before the exhibition opened. Is this anti-Zen? Or has the artist found an ultra-Zen method to process violence in art and life?

Another detail that may have been overlooked: only one of the dozens and dozens of yakuza-like warriors in the painting has eyes, and, to eerie effect, they are the same shimming goldleaf color of the background.

Finally, the most important detail of the exhibition: all of the people who came to Japan Society Gallery to explore and enjoy Garden of Unearthly Delights. Above are 25 of the hundreds of Instagram selfies taken by people in teamLab's immersive and interactive Flowers and People installation created exclusively for the exhibition.

The show may be over, but enjoy it one last time (or in perpetuity) with this video walkthrough brought to you by Japan Society Gallery.

--Shannon Jowett



Images (top-to-bottom): Manabu Ikeda, (b. 1973), Foretoken, 2008; pen, acrylic ink on paper, mounted on boards; 72 x 132 in; collection of Sustainable Investor Co., Ltd. © Manabu Ikeda, courtesy Mizuma Art Gallery. Manabu Ikeda, Meltdown, 2013; acrylic ink on paper, mounted on board, 48 x 48 in.; Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Colonel Rex W. & Maxine Schuster Radsch Endowment Fund purchase, 2013.24. Manabu Ikeda, Mountains and Clouds, 2012; pen, acrylic ink on paper, mounted on board; 24 x 27 3/5 in; Private Collection, Tokyo (courtesy of Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo), © Manabu Ikeda, courtesy Mizuma Art Gallery. Photo by Kei Miyajima. Manabu Ikeda, Imprint, 2011; pen, acrylic ink on paper, mounted on board; 24 x 36 in.; Collection of Mr. Harvey Sawikin and Mrs. Andrea Krantz; © Manabu Ikeda, courtesy Mizuma Art Gallery, photo by Kei Miyajima. Manabu Ikeda, Grass Mantis (Kusakamakiri), 2004; acrylic ink on paper, mounted on board; 9 1/16 x 11 7/16 in.; Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison, John H. Van Vleck Endowment Fund purchase, 2013.25. Hisashi Tenmyouya, (b. 1966), Neo Thousand Armed Kannon, 2002; acrylic, wood; 89 ½ x 68 5/16 in.; Takahashi Collection, Tokyo; © Hisashi Tenmyouya, courtesy Mizuma Art Gallery. Hisashi Tenmyouya, Rhyme, 2012; acrylic paint, gold leaf on wood; inkjet print on paper, mounted on wood; each 49 7/8 x 118 1/8 in.; Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Colonel Rex W. & Maxine Schuster Radsch Endowment Fund purchase, 2013.23.1-.2a-b; fiberglass reinforced polyester, calcium carbonate; variable dimensions; Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison, John H. Van Vleck Endowment Fund purchase, 2013.23.3a-g; installation photograph by Richard P. Goodbody. teamLab (est. 2001), United, Fragmented, Repeated, and Impermanent World (detail), 2013; interactive digital work, 8 screens; endless, 9:16; sound by Hideaki Takahashi; courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery; images via Instagram. teamLab, Flowers and People—Gold and Dark, 2014; digital work, endless; courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery; surrounding Ever Blossoming Life—Dark, 2014, and Ever Blossoming Life—Gold, 2014, both digital works, endless, courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery; images via Instagram.

Nothing Less Than Perfection: The Dedication of Japan’s Master Craftsmen

Tekumi Manabu Ikeda can take years to finish one of his renowned detailed paintings. Via.

The work is done, but just one small detail seems off. If no one notices, is it worth fixing?

In Japan, the answers to questions like these are what separate an ordinary artisan from takumi – masters of their craft.

Takumi are artists who have honed and perfected their skills over years, perhaps a lifetime, of training. They can be craftsmen, potters, and textile makers, among many other professions, and are a major part of Japanese tradition. Though their numbers have dwindled, there are still many active takumi who remain dedicated to their craft. In contemporary Japan, the term has acquired a more generic adjectival meaning, implying a person with an especially sophisticated skill in any field of creation, including food and fashion.

These masters are known for dedication to their philosophies and methods of art-making, and the artists featured in Japan Society’s Garden of Unearthly Delights are no exception. Each artist possesses traits common to all takumi: perfectionism, diligence, and most importantly, discipline.

Manabu Ikeda exemplifies this with his incredibly detailed drawing style that is extremely time-consuming to achieve; one large-scale work can take him two or more years to complete. Using a fine-point pen, Ikeda creates monumental landscapes that can overwhelm the viewer at first glance.

Hisashi Tenmyouya is a different kind of takumi who skillfully blends tradition with modern themes. His works juxtapose traditional symbols and imagery with a brash, contemporary style that he calls Neo Nihonga―a renewed, revitalized version of Japanese-style painting.

TeamLab is a collective of hundreds of takumi working in various areas of art, design and technology. Via. 

Like Tenmyouya, teamLab blends the old and the new, but follows a more technology-oriented path. As an expansive collective of creators from varying specialties (it now has over 300 members), it’s a far cry from the traditional solitary image of takumi, but when looking at the amazingly high-tech work the members have created, it’s hard to deny that they’re just as deserving of the title.

Discussing takumi in the catalog for Garden of Unearthly Delights,  exhibition co-curator Laura J. Mueller said the works "are imbued with an undeniable spirituality or religiosity that adds great weight to their effectiveness and meaning."

Japan Society has presented many exhibitions featuring takumi in recent years. Contemporary Clay: Japanese Ceramics for the New Century (2006) exhibited some of Japan’s finest potters and celebrated the rich history of Japanese ceramics and those who have made lasting contributions to the art form over the past half century.

The Genius of Japanese Lacquer: Masterworks by Shibata Zeshin (2008) showcased Japan’s greatest lacquer artist, recognized worldwide for his exquisitely detailed lacquered boxes, panels, sword mounts, and other objects, as well as scrolls painted in both ink and lacquer.

And New Bamboo: Contemporary Japanese Masters (2009) was devoted exclusively to Japanese bamboo as a sculptural medium, which featured 90 works from 23 innovators who demonstrate awesome technique, meticulous attention to detail, and extraordinary creativity.

As takumi tend to be innovators, each of them have wildly different and recognizable styles, such as Ikeda’s; once you’ve been mesmerized by one of his massive drawings, you’re not likely to forget it.

However, there’s one thing they all share: an obsession with perfection, the results of which we’ll be able to appreciate for years to come.

--Mark Gallucci

Tenmyouya at work. Via.

Facing Forward, Looking Back: Hisashi Tenmyouya’s 'Street-Samurai' Style

Detail of Tenmyouya's Rhyme.

Hisashi Tenmyouya is a man of many styles. He’s a rebel and an innovator, doing his best to express the diversity of Japanese culture through art.

“Japanese culture has been considered a world that is ascetic, static, simple, minimal, one of anime and manga," Tenmyouya said in an interview with Laura J. Mueller, who co-curated the exhibition Garden of Unearthly Delights: Works by Ikeda, Tenmyouya & teamLab, opening today at Japan Society. "However, that is just one aspect of Japanese culture. It is more diverse. We treasure the sight of cherry blossoms falling from the tree. We amuse ourselves with fireworks exploding like flowers blooming in the sky. We enjoy festivals with elaborately designed floats moving down the street.”

Tenmyouya has invented several self-described styles in the years he's been making art. His Butō-ha (circa 2000) depicts resistance towards the authoritative art system. His Neo-Nihonga (2001) incorporates elements of traditional Japanese art (nihonga), while using contemporary art styles and modern art materials, such as acrylic paint. And most recently, Basara (2010) draws inspiration from the extraordinary beauty of past eras, including the woodblock print artists of the late Edo period (1615 – 1867), and the kabukimono (men, often samurai, who dressed and acted flamboyantly) of the late Sengoku era (mid-15th to late 16th centuries).

“My manifesto, Basara, is based on the subculture of the ‘street-samurai culture’ that is excessively decorative and imbued with a rebellious spirit that defies traditional values. Basara stands for anti-authority and anti-aristocratic culture, which is derived from samurai culture on the streets. Basara represents a counter to the traditional values of wabi, sabi, Zen, and otaku,” he said.

Still, even across multiple styles, there are some common themes to be found in Tenmyouya’s work. His paintings tend to depict subjects that are in direct contrast with each other.

His 2002 work Neo Thousand-Armed Kannon presents Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, with her many arms holding machine guns, army knives and pistols. The piece examines the state of the world in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in the U.S., highlighting the close relationship between violence and faith despite their opposite natures.

These contrasts are not always so serious, however. He also created a poster for the 2006 FIFA World Cup, appropriately titled Football, depicting two soccer players wearing samurai armor and decorative helmets in the midst of a battle for the ball - one player with his leg pulled back, ready to kick, and the other sliding towards him in an attempt to steal the ball away.

"[His] works exude an historic feel that is also wholly contemporary,” wrote Vicente Gutierrez in The Japan Times about Tenmyouya's Tokyo exhibition in 2009.

“Tenmyouya’s paintings of fantastic beasts and tattooed warriors are a record-album-cover designer’s version of Buddhist and Shinto religious icons,” wrote the The New York Times’ Holland Cotter, when Tenmyouya was featured in Japan Society's 2011 exhibition Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art.

Even though his solo exhibitions have mainly taken place in Tokyo, people from all around the world have been introduced to Tenmyouya’s unique style when his works have been showcased in places such as Berlin, Sydney and Singapore. He made his U.S. debut in 2002 in One Planet Under a Groove: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art at New York’s Bronx Museum.

He received more worldwide exposure with the 2006 video documentary Near Equal Tenmyouya Hisashi (released internationally as Hisashi Tenmyouya: Samurai Nouveau), in which director Go Ishizaki followed Tenmyouya as he worked on his paintings.



Japan Society’s Garden of Unearthly Delights features Tenmyouya’s first large-scale installation: a room adorned with several of his paintings, placed around a Zen garden with volcanic rocks and skulls planted in a sea of blood-red sand. One of the centerpieces of the room, his most recent work Rhyme, is a sizable painting which depicts yakuza-type men battling each other wearing nothing but fundoshi (ceremonial loincloths). While the subject matter is traditional, there is a sense of surrealism (a tiger and several horses wearing armor against a shimmering gold background), and the style is thought to be influenced by Leonardo de Vinci’s early-Renaissance The Battle of Angihari (1505).

It’s one of the many influences that contribute to Tenmyouya’s distinctive “street-samurai” style, in addition to his striking visual approach. His always-innovating, rebellious mindset makes each of his paintings more unpredictable than the last. With new styles, new ideas and new concepts, Hisashi Tenmyouya will be a fascinating artist to follow in the years to come.

--Mark Gallucci, additional reporting by Younjoo Sang

Images (top to bottom, left to right):  Hisashi Tenmyouya, (b. 1966), Rhyme (Detail), 2012. Acrylic paint, gold leaf on wood; inkjet print on paper, mounted on wood; each 49 7/8 x 118 1/8 in. Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Colonel Rex W. & Maxine Schuster Radsch Endowment Fund purchase, 2013.23.1-.2a-b.; Neo Thousand Armed Kannon, 2002. Acrylic, wood; 89 ½ x 68 5/16 in. Takahashi Collection, Tokyo. © Hisashi Tenmyouya, courtesy Mizuma Art Gallery; Football, 2004, official poster selection of the 2006 World Cup in Germany; Neo Acalanatha (Detail), 2004. Acrylic, wood; 42 1/3 x 18 5/7 in. Collection of Katsura Yamaguchi. © Hisashi Tenmyouya, courtesy Mizuma Art Gallery.

Meticulously Monumental: Manabu Ikeda’s Dedication to Perfection

Manabu Ikeda attends to details. Via.

The wave rises. Uprooted buildings, destroyed planes, and derailed trains follow. A giant glacier is swept along, rope-tethered climbers working to scale the massive chunk of ice as it travels. Roads have been split, tunnels upturned, and a raging fire is rapidly consuming what’s left of a small forest. This could be the apocalypse.

Or it could be a mere fraction of what’s taking place in Manabu Ikeda’s Foretoken, a drawing of a massive, 6 by 11 foot wave crashing through civilization.

Ikeda’s works are examples of precision and persistence which sacrifice neither scope nor detail, depicting painstakingly crafted landscapes laden with subtle touches and sweeping emotion. To achieve this, he uses a small, fine-point acrylic pen for his drawings, working on only a few inches each day for up to eight hours, which will eventually make up the minute details of a much larger piece, which often takes him years to complete. For his current project, Ikeda is in the middle of a three-year residency at the Chazen Museum of Art, working on a single drawing.

Commenting on Meltdown, one of Ikeda’s more recent drawings, Chazen director Russell Panczenko told the Wisconsin State Journal, “if you look closely, with all this detail covering the whole surface, there isn’t a pen stroke that is more than an eighth of an inch in length. So – talk about intensity.”

Ikeda’s meticulous approach is very much connected to Japanese tradition. In Japan the term takumi is reserved for one who has mastered his/her profession at the highest level of technical precision.

“The master does it by hand; that’s what makes him the master. That’s important to him,” Panczenko noted.

Ikeda’s work process tends to be spontaneous, as he either sketches quickly thought-out images in sketchbooks or directly inks his larger works without a sketch draft.

Manabu Ikeda's Foretoken (Detail), 2008. Pen, acrylic ink on paper, mounted on boards; 72 x 132 in. Collection of Sustainable Investor Co., Ltd. © Manabu Ikeda, courtesy Mizuma Art Gallery.

“I use ideas that flash in my mind at the moment,” Ikeda said in an interview with Hi-Fructose Magazine. “From a distance, I look at the whole balance of work, and finally determine the image, which takes about one year after I started drawing. Recently, I try to have a whole solid image in the beginning to shorten the time.”

Ikeda’s works received much critical praise in America during Japan Society's 2011 exhibition Bye Bye Kitty!!!, which highlighted contemporary Japanese artists whose works utilized traditional styles while going against foreign preconceptions of Japanese art.

The New Yorker described Ikeda as “a visionary”, saying, “It would take you hours to explore thoroughly, and then you’d have to start over, to refresh your memory. Does this sound like a stunt? It’s an enchantment.” The New York Times praised Ikeda’s attention to detail:

… nothing tops Manabu Ikeda’s miniaturist ink landscapes and cityscapes. In "Existence" he presents the world as a giant, decomposing tree. In “History of Rise and Fall,” it becomes a shifting, clattering architectural pileup: a million-roofed samurai castle garnished with cherry trees, fragmented Buddhist sculptures and ant-size hanged human figures.

From October 10 to January 11, visitors to Japan Society Gallery can experience the largest number of Manabu Ikeda’s drawings assembled to date, presented alongside works by “ultra technologist” collective teamLab and Neo-Nihonga purveyor Hisashi Tenmyouya in Garden of Unearthly Delights: Works by Ikeda, Tenmyouya & teamLab.

The exhibition showcases a crossover from past to present, according to Japan Society Gallery director and exhibition co-curator Miwako Tezuka. Many of Ikeda’s drawings focus on this transition – more specifically, on the shift from reliance on nature to reliance on technology.

“I agree that we benefit a lot from advanced technology," Ikeda told Hi-Fructose, "but at the same time, I feel that we are acting contrary to nature, which makes me feel endangered. Also, figuratively, accomplished shapes do not move my heart. At the end, for example, the mystery of a caterpillar’s color and shape is much more fun for me than any amazing technology.”

-- Mark Gallucci; additional reporting by Younjoo Sang

Seeds of 'Unearthly Delights': teamLab's Digital Garden

teamLab's immersive, interactive art, part of of Japan Society's' fall exhibition Garden of Unearthly Delights.

TeamLab is a collective of around 300 individuals specializing in various areas such as art, design, mathematics, and computer engineering. With their combined efforts, they create works that blur the lines between art and technology.

Although they invent cutting-edge software to create their art, their roots are distinctly traditional, drawing inspiration from scenes of nature and domestic landscapes commonly found in classical Japanese paintings.

Their artistic and technological prowess can be viewed in the exhibition Ultra Subjective Space at Pace Gallery through August 15. Much of the work depicts a three-dimensional world with three-dimensional objects, but “flattened” to emulate the look of Japanese paintings.

Traditional East Asian landscape paintings depict space in layers of picture planes; one at the foreground, the other in the middle-ground, and then the last one indicating the farthest space in the background. Transitional spaces are to be then completed in one’s own (i.e. subjective) imagination. On the other hand, Western art has been using a linear perspective with one fixed point.

"Western approach to spatial representation is based on optical illusion," explains Miwako Tezuka, director of Japan Society Gallery. "Before Japanese learned the linear perspective system to create visual illusion in painting, I think they felt, rather than saw the depth by empathetically entering into the planes of foreground, middle-ground, and background of paintings.

Teamlab shares this point of view, stating in their manifesto:

We propose that people in Japan at that time may have actually seen the world as they chose to depict it in Japanese painting. People of today have a perception of space that is based on the perspective they see in photos and paintings, but is it not possible that people of old saw and were able to feel space in the art work they looked at?” teamLab wrote on their website.

In an evocative review of the Pace exhibition, VICE illustrated teamLab's achievement of capturing this:

The European standard of linear perspective is absent from these compositions, allowing viewers to place themselves anywhere inside the scene, rather than being limited to a single point of view… [The works] each capture a celebratory perspective on nature, effortlessly combined with the sleek, clean, hi-tech texture intrinsic in their medium.

The combination of design and technology also makes their work an interactive experience.



The Ever Blossoming Life series, for example, shows a cluster of flowers in a gold background and a dark blue-black background where flowers bloom, drop their petals, wither, and die with progression of time. While the flowers collectively bloom and wilt ad infinitum, they are programmed so that they display the images in real time and never duplicate their previous states. Just like real flowers, each flower bud blooming, wilting and falling cannot be repeated exactly the same again. The life of each plant, the duration of each flower is a unique image in space and time.

After their Pace Gallery show, teamLab will have their first major museum presentation in Japan Society Gallery's fall exhibition Garden of Unearthly Delights: Works by Ikeda, Tenmyouya & teamLab. Their work is a perfect fit for the show that highlights visionaries shaping the present and future of Japanese art while harkening to the past.

The moving images that teamLab creates are extraordinary in the original sense of the word: their nature-filled landscapes not only reminisce one of the classical Japanese painting subjects of “flowering plants of four seasons” but also are truly out of this world, says Tezuka.

"They contain so much more visual and philosophical information than what our mere eyes can perceive. They invite our multi-sensory participation, and this fall, we will have that very chance to participate in strolling through a brand-new digital garden that will blossom in Japan Society Gallery."

--Younjoo Sang

Photo: teamLab (est. 2001), United, Fragmented, Repeated, and Impermanent World, 2013 (detail). Interactive digital work, 8 screens; endless, 9:16; sound by Hideaki Takahashi. Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery.

Vessel Across Time: Mariko Mori's Jōmon Jump

Sister Cisterns: Mori's Flatstone (right) mirrors a kaen-doki from 3,500–2,500 BCE.

She wears all white and a calm smile. Somewhere in her artistic wanderings, she’s traveled the universe. Seen black holes and white holes. Watched stars be born and die, spilling their insides onto the canvas of space.

Not what you’d expect from someone reaching back sixteen millennia in her art.

In her recently opened solo exhibition Rebirth, Mariko Mori combines a range of styles and beliefs: New Age spirituality, technological futurism, a little Buddhism, Shinto influences. Some will have no trouble tapping into the show’s meditative wavelength and sense of renewal. Others might get lost in the exhaust of complexity and primal energies. What no one can deny is the presence of the ancient, brought to light in 2013 from the memory of Jōmon.

Best known for their stone circles and intricate pottery, the people of Jōmon Japan lived roughly between 14,000 and 300 B.C.E. They were, as far as we can tell, the first to “[master] the technology of transforming pliable clay into hard and durable containers,” with contemporary scholarly debate centered on the practical and artistic relevance of these artifacts, according to Junko Habu's Ancient Jomon of Japan.

Mori began her study of the period with fieldwork at Jōmon archaeological sites like Ōyu, Sannai Maruyama, and Miwayama, home to several of the stone circles and spherical stones that have remained intact through the millennia. From this fieldwork, in addition to collaboration with Chief Curator at Aomori Museum of Art, Iida Takayo, came the initial exhibition, Mariko Mori Jōmon: The Fossil of Light “Transcircle” Exhibition, that prepared the way for the artist's current Rebirth.

Mori's Flatstone leads to Transcircle 1.1.

Merely viewing the separate pieces in Mori’s exhibit may puzzle some visitors. After all, a 5,000-year-old Jōmon vase and the LED-powered monoliths of Transcircle 1.1 don’t exactly seem like bedfellows. It’s only after reading more about the people of prehistoric Japan that the connection is made.

The fact that the Jōmon era is named after the cord markings adorning the pottery gives one an idea of how much these artifacts have come to represent the beliefs, lifestyles, and history of an enigmatic people. All can agree to their importance, but this is where the consensus ends. Whether the pots were used in religious ritual as an embodiment of animistic belief, or they are the tools of a society of hunter-gatherers is a matter of great debate. If the latter—and recent studies suggest the pots may have been used to store fish—it would upend the idea that clay pottery was impractical for a people constantly on the move. Then again, it takes no great effort of the imagination to see the designs as the “ripples and eddies on the surfaces of the salmon-rich river,” as Iida Takayo describes them, rather than the flames from which the pots, or kaen-doki, take their name.

Jōmon stone figurines and monoliths have proven equally difficult to explain. While some dogū, or figurines, call to mind the famous “Venus” figurines of Paleolithic Europe and Asia—both types emphasize the hips and breasts, suggesting ties to fertility—others defy classification. These oddities feature a combination of human and animal features, such as dogū with horns or a cat head. Some hold a secret inside; one figure discovered in Nagashiki, Kanagawa Prefecture, contained bone particles and teeth from a child.

Writing on the topic of dogū in 1974, Johannes Maringer traced a connection between the figurines and the Jōmon peoples’ belief in animals as “epiphanies of higher beings.” Other artifacts help us approach an idea of the Jōmon religious worldview. For example, Simon Kaner argues that the arrangement of bodies in burial grounds at Sannai Maruyama, one of the largest Jōmon settlements ever unearthed, suggests both a belief in the afterlife and a kind of ancestor worship.

While some have theorized that Jōmon peoples’ overdependence on ritual contributed to their downfall against the rice-based Yayoi civilization, Kaner contends it was these very rituals that allowed their successful assimilation. After all, he says, at the core of Jōmon religious practice is a belief in the power of the individual to transform.

By combining Jōmon art styles with modern techniques—one of Mori’s pieces, Flatstone, features an acrylic recreation of an ancient Jōmon vase at its center—Mori sets to capture the fluidity of life, death, and inspiration. Those people of millennia past are not so much an interesting historical subject as a living pulse. “My body contains genes inherited from our earliest ancestors,” Mori says in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, “and those genes can produce a strong reaction when they try to arouse that special consciousness which slumbers deep within me.”

In his essay, Kaner cites Kobayashi Tatsuo and others as setting forth the theory that the people of Jōmon Japan may have used ritual not to assimilate into the Yayoi, as he himself believes, but to resist them and the revolutionary agricultural lifestyle they represented. The idea is particularly intriguing when we consider Mori and her artistic transformation over the last decade, from pointed critic of consumerism and the super-modern to student of both prehistoric and New Age spiritualism. You almost wonder if Mori isn’t using her own ritual, her art, to mount a largely silent resistance against the strange times in which we live.

--Andres Oliver

Photos(clockwise): kaen-doki flame-ware vase, Middle Jōmon period (3,500–2,500 BCE), Earthenware, 11 5/8 inches high, 11 5/8 inches diam, collection of John C. Weber; Mariko Mori's Flatstone (2006), ceramic stones and acrylic vase; 192 x 124 x 3 ½ inches, courtesy of SCAI THE BATHHOUSE, Tokyo and Sean Kelly, New York; FOREGROUND: Flatstone, BACKGROUND: Transcircle 1.1, 2004. Stone, Corian, LED, real-time control system, 132 3/8 inches diam., each stone 43 3/8 × 22 1/4 × 13 1/2 inches, courtesy of The Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Installation photograph by Richard Goodbody.

A Star Is Reborn: Mariko Mori Expands Through Inner And Outer Space

White Hole shatters negative space and thoughts. Photo by Richard Goodbody.

When you Google Mariko Mori, you come face-to-face with images of a living doll—literally. The artist's 1994 piece Play With Me had her stationed outside a Tokyo toy store in anime-esque garb, with baby-blue pigtails and a plastic breastplate over a short, metallic dress. In another work from that year, Mori rode the subway in character as an alien visitor just arrived in Tokyo.

Today Japan Society Gallery launches Mori's first solo exhibition in New York in more than 10 years. A divergence from her work of centuries past (well, the 90s), Rebirth: Recent Work by Mariko Mori brings the focus on nature, conveying both its power and serenity.

The show “has a very urgent message about reconnecting with nature, which is not just an issue that’s being talked about by artists. It is a global concern right now,” says Dr. Miwako Tezuka, director of Japan Society Gallery, who curated the exhibition. “We’ve been experiencing such harsh weather. Everybody’s concerned about what’s going on with nature.”

Just a year ago this month, the brightest city in the world went dark for weeks when late-season Hurricane Sandy eliminated electricity from the bottom half of Manhattan. Polar bears swim for days. Mori’s home country will long feel the effects of the March 2011 tsunami.

While once Mariko Mori represented pop aesthetics and the subculture of Japan, her recent work has brought her back to basics: as in the beginning of it all.

“She’s going back to the roots," says Tezuka. "Not the cultural roots of Japan like she was doing before, but even farther back into a prehistoric period where there really were no cultural differences in the world. Where people didn’t have electricity or machines and really lived closely, intimately with nature.”

Unlike her past work, the pieces in Rebirth were born from Mori’s personal research, often from her travels to places like Egypt, Brazil, and Scotland, where so much ancient architecture still stands.

The show is full of light and shapes, a pale, shifting exhibition reminiscent of the sun rising over a young Earth again and again. Depending on one’s perspective, personal associations could range from the Book of Genesis to the opening sequence of Star Wars to whatever Terrence Malick’s been up to. Rare will be the attendee who doesn't spot Stonehenge.

The centerpiece of the show is an installation called White Hole (pictured above): the opposite of space's terrifying black holes of childhood fascination and nightmares. A domed enclosure built in the south gallery, White Hole starts as a pitch-dark space and gradually illuminates with the projection of swirling light.

Tezuka explains: “It’s based on the theory of a white hole--the antithesis of a black hole. Everything that was killed by the black hole shapes together as a renewed energy and emerges from the white hole. It’s an astrophysics theory that Mariko has been very interested in in recent years.”

Another celestial piece (though firmly fixed to the gallery floor) is Transcircle 1.1 Nine pillars made of stone and an industrial acrylic polymer synchronize with the position of the nine (yes, nine!) planets in our solar system. Their individual pastel colors pulsate at speeds reflecting the planets' orbits around the sun.

Rebirth is an ethereal picture of prehistory, astronomy, geology, ancient religion and technology, showing how they all mix in the world around us.

When asked how to sum up the show in a sentence, Tezuka said “pure” and then laughed, realizing she didn't need half a dozen more words to convey its Zen-like ambiance. “A lot of things are white”—Mori’s signature color—“and the basic concept is pure and simple: be aware of the presence of nature.”

Though the galleries proper are on the second floor, visitors will get a taste of this pure simplicity when they are greeted by Ring, hanging against the waterfall of the Society's indoor bamboo garden.

“Mariko placed it in an environment that symbolizes nature, where there’s water, earth, plants and light from above,” Tezuka says. The piece is a prototype for a large-scale version that will be hung above a Brazilian waterfall in the near future.

From sunset each evening through Sunday, Mori’s latest video work Ālaya lights up the building just above the Society’s entryway for not only gallery-goers but passersby on the busy streets outside. The title alludes to the fundamental consciousness all sentient beings share in Buddhist philosophy.

It’s worth coming in to escape the masses, as Tezuka notes: “New York life is so busy all the time. You are surrounded with noise and different crowds. Rebirth will calm you down. Instead of going to yoga, come see this exhibition!”

Rebirth: Recent Work by Mariko Mori is on view at Japan Society through January 12, 2014.

--Marisa Rindone

Mariko Mori's Ring. Photo by the author. Via.

The ‘Moe’ You Know: 'three' Opens Figurine Disfiguring Studio To The Public

'Mike' cubicized by the artist collective 'three'.

UPDATE: three's exhibit three is a magic number 7 opened Aug. 27.

The Japanese concept of moe (pronounced MO-EH) is a connection one has with a manga or anime character somewhere between first love, a priest’s eternal devotion and an otaku’s obsessive infatuation. A footnote from the catalogue to Little Boy, Japan Society's massive 2005 exhibition that was wall-to-wall moe, explains that it means "literally, 'bursting into bud'; a rarefied pseudo-love for certain fictional characters and their related embodiments."

Anyone suffering from a deep case of moe might not survive a visit to three’s temporary studios at Japan Society.

JapanCultureNYC described the scene in graphic detail in their recent article about the Fukushima-based artist collective:

One room of Japan Society’s gallery is an organized mess. There are plastic figurines everywhere. Miniature representations of manga, anime, and pop culture icons, five hundred are from Japan, with a small but growing collection from the US. The action figures are waiting to be assembled, photographed, meticulously categorized, unapologetically dismembered, and melted into rectangular “bits.”

When we visited the studios, the dismemberment was well underway, and you could barely make out recognizable figures [figyua in Japanese, a transliteration of "figure"] within the heaps of plastic cartoon and human shaped characters dissembled and spread all over.

But what three lacks of moe’s typical reverence, they more than make up for in obsessive, painstaking devotion. These hundreds of figurines are being melted into cubes of plastic perfection, identifiable only by familiar color schemes and the very occasional flattened body part. As the JapanCultureNYC article noted, three creates “a kind of interactivity between the sculpture and the viewers to see which characters stand out and to capture the reactions.”

This Saturday people will have a chance to meet the artists at a free open studio, and see some of the work-in-progress before 555 sculptures go on display in Japan Society A-Level in late August.

As the artists were rushing to get work done for the open studio, we had the chance to speak with them about their work and also how their first time in America has been. Shy but effortlessly cool and concentrated, the anonymous three artists that comprise three had much to say about their experience.

How did you feel before you came to New York?

It was around 3-4 months before coming to Japan Society when we were officially invited to be a part of the residency. While getting ready, we couldn’t believe we would actually be going to New York and America for the first time. We felt very honored to be a part of the program especially since there are three of us. We have heard it is quite unusual to accept more than one artist at a time. The fact that as a group we could go together really made it hard for us to believe. Our feelings were more disbelief than excitement.

Have you noticed big differences between the Japan and the U.S.?

Through the process of finding animation figures we realized there are certain differences between Japan and [the U.S.]. First of all, their form is totally different. What’s interesting about American figures is that they all have joints to allow people to bend their legs and arms to create their favorite pose. Also, the texture of the American figures are much harder than ones in Tokyo. This makes it easier to bend and position them in the ways you want.

What were some difficulties in finding figurines here?

There were so many different types of figures from the same animated series. It was difficult for us to find standard Spongebob figures for example. There are so many different versions of this one character based on different episodes and special stories. There were so many different types of Spongebobs!

Where did you find the figurines?

We went to Midtown Comics, Forbidden Planet near Union Square, another store around Union Square but we forgot the name (please forgive us). Oh we also went to Toys"R"Us! It was the first store we went to in New York. Amazing and full of toys!

Have you seen any good exhibits or discovered new artists?

We have only been to MoMA so far. We have not had much time to experience anything [besides work]. However we are very excited to do so after the residency!

What do you want people viewing your art to feel?

We want them to feel delight. We want them to have fun thinking what the cubic figure was like before. For the exhibition, we are using a minimalistic approach by getting rid of the wall text descriptions and using QR codes. [People can scan it and see the original figure on their smart phones.] There are also some American figures mixed with the Japanese, so we hope some people can also have an “AHA! I know this” type moment.

Another thing is we want Americans to take note of is the difference between Japanese and American animation. The difference in color (color compression) is quite notable between Japanese and American figures. In Japanese figures the color of skin is dominant. What this means is that most figures are likely to expose their skin more than American figures. Also the Japanese figures that we use are mostly female. Some of their clothing is also removable (and surprisingly they wear underwear). When we melt them down into cubic form, the skin tone is much more prevalent than with melted American figures.

Why do you think Japanese figurines show more flesh?

The purpose of buying figures is different for Japanese and Americans. Let’s just say that the Japanese figure industries produce with moe in mind.

Are you excited about your open studio at Japan Society on July 27th?

It’s quite rare that we "three" interact with people individually because we have been anonymous. This will be our first time to meet with people and discuss our work. We think this is a great opportunity for us to explain our working process and are very nervous but excited.

--Interview by Susan Berhane. Translation assistance by Reika Horii. Special thanks to three and the Japan Society Gallery team for their assistance.

[UPDATED 7/29/13]

Revived Residency Program Sends Ripples Of 'three' In NYC

Detail of three’s Tokyo Electric.

A piece of Japan Society’s history is being restored this summer with the return of the long-dormant artist residency program. Throughout the month of July Japan Society hosts the Japanese artist collective three, which reshapes popular and mass culture into three dimensional sculpture, installations and video.

For much of their craft, three utilizes found plastic materials, from anime and video game figurines to soy sauce containers, to create dynamic, large-scale works of art. Highlighting many of three's recent works, design site Spoon & Tamago noted the social consciousness of their art:

Hailing from Fukushima, the artists were direct victims of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear fallout. In fact, their latest work "Tokyo Electric" was created for the 2nd anniversary of the earthquake. The imposing cubic structure stands over 3 meters high and is built to the same scale of the Fukushima nuclear power plant, explains the artists. It was made from 151,503 soy sauce containers – another symbolic number that happens to represent the number of displaced citizens.

During their residency they will gather materials from around NYC to create new works of art. The public will have an opportunity to visit the group’s onsite studio and see the works in progress and meet the artists on July 27, before the final work is displayed on Japan Society’s A-Level in August and September.

Beginning in the 1950s Japan Society supported a handful of Japanese artists during their influential developmental stages, expanding American understanding of Japanese art and culture and providing an outlet for Japanese artists to hone their talent.

In 1959 one of the first such artists was Munakata Shiko, an illustrious printmaker who produced amazing, expressionistic woodblock prints. A grant from the Rockefeller Foundation allowed Japan Society to sponsor Munakata in the U.S. for six months, during which he gave four exhibitions and twenty lecture-demonstrations, according to the Society’s 1959 annual report. That same year he opened Munakata Shiko Gallery.

When the Japan Society Fellows Program was established in 1965, Kusama Yayoi became another artist supported by the Society. With a four month grant for study, exhibitions and travel, she created some of her iconic infinity series of paintings. In 2012 the Whitney presented a highly acclaimed and broad sweeping retrospective of Kusama’s work.

Japan Society’s Gallery Director, Miwako Tezuka, is passionate about the reappearance of the residency program and its continuation for years to come. “In my own experience,” she says, “any hands extended to help people learn and experience the broader world create ripple effects that can result in amazing accomplishments and lasting influence.”

--Susan Berhane

Silver Wind's 'Waves' Roll Back To Japan

Detail of Hōitsu's Waves courtesy of the Seikadō Bunko Art Museum

The silver-leafed crown jewels of Japan Society’s critically acclaimed exhibition Silver Wind: The Arts of Sakai Hōitsu (1761-1828), Waves wave sayonara this weekend when they return to Japan after Sunday, November 11.

Due to their fragility, the pair of gorgeous 12-feet, six-panel screens, on loan from the Seikadō Bunko Art Museum for the first time ever to the U.S., was originally scheduled to return home on the 4th, after a five-week showcase, but are hanging around an extra week due to the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

America’s upper East Coast experienced the terrible force of nature when the super storm tore through. Though it may be too soon to reflect or heal from the experience (one week later many people are still displaced from homes and hundreds of thousands are without electricity), disaster has a way of feeding art, and the creative process can help counter and transcend devastation.

With this in mind Waves takes on a new level of meaning. In Hōitsu’s deft hands, the samurai-turned-monk-turned-painter tames nature’s belligerent power. His enormous cresting, crashing, black-and-white-on-silver waves are rendered hypnotic and ghostly—phantasmagoric hands beckoning from the depths, a specter of disaster washing gray in memory with the passing of time.

Fundamentally, though, the screens are pure, timeless art. From his sumptuous catalogue for Silver Wind, curator Professor Matthew P. McKelway writes about the screens’ singular visual power:

Waves are a tour de force of vigorous commanding brushwork, compositional tension and balance and control of the unusual—and changing—effects of light and color on the screens’ surface. . .

McKelway also cites the complexity and technical challenges inherent in the work’s unique medium:

Although a specialty of Hōitsu’s, painting on silver leaf nevertheless posed challenges that a painter would not encounter with gold leaf. Silver leaf tarnishes over time, while gold leaf retains its warm tone without darkening. Like gold leaf, silver leaf cannot absorb ink and pigments, requiring the painter to take special measures to ensure that the image adheres to the resistant surface. Hōitsu brushed the waves in thick strokes of saturated ink that would better stick to the silvered finish. Throughout the screens, he applied diluted shell-powder pigment to highlight the waves’ crests and occasionally splattered it on the surface to depict their frothy spray.

In the Wall Street Journal’s  favorable review of Silver Wind, Lee Lawrence compares Hōitsu's Waves to its model/inspiration, Kōrin's Rough Waves (also on view at Japan Society’s exhibition as a loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art):

In both [works], a large wave rushes in from the upper right while another ripples up from the lower left. Kōrin's composition, however, fills a two-panel folding screen, while Hōitsu's spills across two six-panel screens. Kōrin's waves rise from a blue ocean to crest against a gold background; Hōitsu's are in black ink on a silver ground, and the artist echoes the general shape of Kōrin's top wave in his own lower one. The treatment of the metallic background also differs. In Kōrin's screen, the squares of gold leaf are applied unevenly, creating a fluid backdrop, while Hōitsu had his squares of silver leaf applied regularly to form a faint grid behind his swirling, tentacled waves. He probably also treated some leaves to retard their tarnishing, thereby creating a modulation reminiscent of a cloudy sky. . . "Waves" contains familiar Kōrin elements, but with a twist—in this case reversals—that reconfigure the composition to form something entirely new.

In his rave review of the exhibition for the New York Times, Holland Cotter delves further into the background and influences of Waves:

Hōitsu was of aristocratic samurai lineage but opted out of family politics by taking Buddhist vows. . . At some point in that past the Sakai family had commissioned work from Kōrin, so Hōitsu had some pictures on hand to study and made strenuous efforts to locate more, eventually publishing illustrations of 100 Kōrin paintings. The truest evidence of his respect, though, lay in his emulation of the master’s art, most spectacularly in the six-panel screen "Waves" (1815), a direct but utterly original response to Kōrin’s "Rough Waves."

Hōitsu began his picture with a distinctive feature. As if to establish an enveloping atmosphere of fogs and snow flurries, he painted directly on a silver-leaf ground. This tractionless surface let his inked brushes slide and glide around calligraphically, producing images of natural emanations more abstract than Kōrin’s but no less vivacious and threatening.

The result is a powerful example of a painting hand on the move—you can imagine Willem de Kooning looking on, lost in admiration—yet a physically fragile thing.

While this weekend marks the last chance to see Waves stateside, beginning November 13 they are replaced by the equally magnificent seasonal splendor of Maples and Cherry
Trees (to be covered in a future post).

Silver Wind is America’s first comprehensive retrospective of the art and influence of Sakai Hōitsu, whose compositional daring revived the Rimpa tradition of art in Edo-period Japan. On view through January 6, 2013, at Japan Society Gallery, the exhibition features nearly 60 masterpieces, including folding screens, hanging scrolls, fans, as well as lacquer works and woodblock-printed books. The catalogue is available from the Yale University Press.

--Shannon Jowett