August – the height of summer. People wither in the scorching heat. No longer able to consciously control themselves, they release a primal scream. That scream becomes a celebration, luring us into an altered, ecstatic state. When you abandon affectation and embrace beauty, you glimpse a part of the universe, a scene that permeates your soul. In summer, we see nakedness. In summer, we see art.

 

This summer, the Gallery will host two exhibitions entitled ‘Scenes of Another Color’. Our aim with these exhibitions is to appreciate the true hue of extraordinary artists whose coloring differs from that of common people. The artists we focus on are indifferent to the art world and the value it places on public recognition. These artistes maintain a distance between themselves and art dealers. Along they way they were likely considered suspicious (usan kusai) by those who sought to establish a frame for what people in the arts were supposed to be and in doing so, to establish themselves as artists. The phrase ‘usan kusai', derived from Chinese during the Edo Period, is a combination of the word 'usan' and the suffix 'kusai' ('stinking'). It originally meant 'strange' or 'uncanny'; literally, 'like usan'. Usan is a fictional spice said to have been popular in medieval Persia but was banned because of the trance states it induced. In light of this, I think that ‘usan kusai' is a very appropriate way of describing the artists we are showcasing here. People who encounter their art will behold an ecstatic scene... indeed art itself is nothing if not trance-inducing.

 

 

Yoshinobu Kato is known as an artist who paints ‘points’. He worked unceasingly on a piece over 100 meters long that consisted solely of monochrome points. The points follow the gist of the arrangement of rocks in his garden. The irreversibility of ‘Horizontal, Diagonal, Diameter’, ‘Dissipative Structure’ and ‘Arrow of Time’—he mutters this sort of thing as he goes about his work painting points. These points are well known; a few years ago, The Japan Times featured him as “the artist who draws ‘dots’.”

 

Talking to the artist, though, it becomes clear that there is no big theory behind the ‘points’. In art criticism twenty years ago, the painter Atsushi Takeda was known not for his ‘systematic production’, nor for being ‘abstract’ or ‘expressionistic’, but as an artist who ‘floated with the tide’. In a similar vein, Kato’s unaffected nature has been recorded by his good friend Toru Sunouchi in the Capricious Museum, which houses Sunouchi’s personal collection. As though moved by those around him, he paints solely according to his whim.

 

Kato was born in Iwanai, Hokkaido in 1932. He began painting in high school after meeting Kinjiro Kida, who was known as the inspiration for Takeo Arishima’s novel Umare izuru nayami (‘Worries from Birth’). He went to Tokyo to sit the entrance examination for the Tokyo University of Arts and Music and there met Sanko Inoue, who took him on as a student and told him, “If you continue to paint a flower as it grows, you will learn much more from that than you will at the University.” Kato went to Washington to assist Inoue with a solo exhibition and became fast friends with the carver Shin Higuchi. Kato stayed on in Washington as one month became three months, and three months became a year. At length, he entered a Buddhist temple to undergo ascetic training but contracted beriberi and soon came down from the mountain. Everything he did, he did on a whim.

 

And so, the monochromatic points that became Yushi byoho (‘Drawing haze’) and Daisan no kuki (‘Third air’) go through continuous tangible transformations, taking on the cast of something altogether different. This work of so many years settles comfortably. The points become a part of the universe, are easily taken up by the providence of nature, and permeate one’s soul in the forms that organisms were originally intended to have. Talk is exhausted. It’s as if his natural beauty has shown its face. He says, “I dedicate this solo exhibit to my wife, who always forgives my heart’s capricious wanderings.”

 

Manager, GALLERY-BS