Yoshida Hodaka and Post-World War II Japanese

Yoshida Hodaka and Post-World War II Japanese and American
Artistic Exchange
Flaten Art Museum, St. Olaf College
February 17 – April 1, 2012
Cover image: Yoshida Hodaka, Nonsense Mythology, 1969, screenprint on paper.
Acknowledgements
This exhibition focuses on the rich artistic and cultural exchange that has taken place
between Japan and the United States since World War II. Tracing the remarkable career
of Yoshida Hodaka, the exhibition explores issues of cultural identity and globalization
experienced by Japanese and Japanese Americans.
Many people and institutions have been instrumental in making this exhibition
possible and I would like to acknowledge a variety of them. Eugene Skibbe ’52 first
approached the St. Olaf Art and Art History Department three years ago suggesting an
exhibition relating to Yoshida Hodaka’s accomplishments. The department readily
agreed, and Gene and his wife Margaret Skibbe ’53 have been generous in numerous
ways from the start. They have taken time to show me works in their house and share
their extensive knowledge of the Yoshida family. They have also loaned a number of
works in the exhibition and recently made a gift to St. Olaf College of Yoshida Hodaka
prints.
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Walker Art Center, and the Weisman Art
Museum also opened their curatorial doors to me and graciously loaned a number of
works. Funding from a variety of sources has helped cover the costs of those loans, some
of the exhibition’s programming, and a research assistance. The exhibition would be far
less robust than it is without funds the museum and I received from the Elle and Kaare
Nygaard Foundation, the Japan Foundation of New York, and the St. Olaf College’s
Faculty Development program and its Center for Undergraduate Research and Inquiry.
CURI money allowed me to hire Erin Poor ’11, who helped launch the research for
this exhibition in the summer of 2010. My colleague Karil Kucera has constantly
provided me with insights and has helped clarify cultural and curatorial issues. The
Director of The Flaten Art Museum, Jill Ewald, has shown patience and remarkable
resourcefulness in bringing the exhibition to fruition, with Registrar Mona Weselmann
ably assisting her on a variety of crucial tasks.
Matthew Rohn, Guest Curator
One-World Vision through Abstraction, Calligraphy, Primitivism, Buddhism and
Confronting a War-Torn World
A Turn to Pure Abstraction in Japanese Art
Yoshida Hodaka, Universe, 1961, color
woodblock print on paper
The turn to purely abstract art following World War II signaled a new direction for
Japanese art involving a complex inquiry into Western modernism and contemplation of
what it meant to be Japanese in Existential terms. The heightened nationalism leading up
to World War II had shielded even those artists interested in Western styles from the
fashion for non-objective art that had steadily grown in importance in Europe and the
United States. Those artists who turned to pure abstraction, including Yoshida Hodaka,
used it to proclaim a very visible break from their nation’s tainted past and to call their
countrymen to join them in venturing into a new and ill-defined future. They did so,
though, constantly risking capitulation at a deep aesthetic level to their American
occupiers.
Champions of pure abstraction in the West had long expounded on its lack of
iconography and thus absence of cultural specificity. Meaning in abstract art was said to
arise from pure formal matters and to transcend any cultural references. It held out a
dream to Westerners and Japanese of breaking down social hierarchies and nationalistic
tribalism by expressing notions of freedom through a universal, purely human form of
communication in art. It could be the art of a new, modern era.
The raw, chaotic imagery that American Abstract Expressionists produced held an
additional appeal for various post-war Japanese. The Americans had found ways to
express the terrors they had felt as they had watched societies and numerous personal
lives fall apart first in the Great Depression and then through World War II. The clashing
forms and the splashes of color in both the American and Japanese works on view played
out this drama, while the paintings’ and prints’ foundational, compositional balance
promised that for both cultures a new, stable order could arise from all the mayhem.
Such abstraction in both countries tended to express rebelliousness and a passion for
change, and Yoshida Hodaka began his life as an artist near the end of the war in a
rebellious way. Though his printmaker father, Hiroshi, had been a progressive who
cultivated Western approaches, Hiroshi scorned abstraction. He apprenticed his older son,
Toshi, to inherit the family printmaking enterprise Hiroshi had founded and expected his
younger son, Hodaka, to study biology in pursuit of another profession. Hodaka pursued
his love of art unbeknownst to his father in the attic and charted a new approach that
other, younger postwar artists would also pioneer through forays into pure abstraction.
Calligraphy-Related Abstraction
Yoshida Hodaka, White Suite A, 1954,
color woodblock print on paper
Calligraphy provided a tenuous but important linkage between the American Abstract
Expressionists and Japanese aesthetics that helped American abstraction influence
developments in postwar Japan. The new, highly influential Japanese art magazine
Bokubi (Ink Art) made much of the affinity between the two by overlaying calligraphy on
a Franz Kline abstraction on the cover of its inaugural issues when it began publication in
1951 and subsequently publishing articles comparing calligraphy and Western gestural
abstraction. By 1951, many commentators in the West had noted the resemblance
between Kline’s gestures and calligraphy.
Kline was among a handful Abstract Expressionists, including David Smith, Jackson
Pollock and Mark Tobey, who experimented with this connection. They spent some time
looking at Chinese and Japanese calligraphy, though, with the exceptions of Tobey, the
relationship between their Action Painting and calligraphy always remained problematic
and largely superficial.
Much knowledge of Asia among the New York intellectuals came through romantic
notions about Zen Buddhism involving beliefs that Asians and their societies were less
developed. These Americans incorrectly perceived calligraphy as a noble remnant of
primal, human mark-making. They assumed that the writer let go of conscious thought
and cultural imperatives when making characters. This, of course, described what the
American, Abstract Expressionists did in making their painting, and it is almost the
antithesis of calligraphy. Even in its more informal approaches, calligraphy has always
been an art rooted in thousands of years old literary traditions and carefully developed
schools of writing characters in established ways.
Ignorant of what the characters meant or the principles of calligraphy itself, American
artists found their own reasons for admiring it. The superficial visual affinity between
their abstractions and calligraphy supported the universalizing principle they desired their
own art to produce and rooted that outlook in the primacy of human mark-making that
they thought informed both arts.
Many Japanese found the affinity to be intriguing and pursued it to at least some
extent because it offered them a privileged link to this new, modern style of art. It
legitimized the idea that they had special insight into the exciting yet strange, new
abstract art Americans were creating. A variety of Japanese artists were content creating
pseudo-calligraphy that they, much more than Americans, knew constituted “sound and
fury, signifying nothing.” They, like their American counterparts, often found themselves
with nothing specific to say in the face of the mass destruction wrought in World War II.
Both preferred a primal scream or a scattering of marks that could abstractly represent a
completely new beginning.
One group of artists, the Bokujin-kai (Ink Human Society) were among the first postwar Japanese artists to use the new American art to help develop their own, radically new
way of creating true calligraphy. This allowed them to explore a state of alienation from
Japanese traditions while simultaneously employing true calligraphy as a means to search
more deeply into what it meant to be authentically Japanese. Morita Shiryu, the founder
of this school and co-founder of the magazine Bokubi, represents these principles well in
the exhibition not only through his calligraphy but also in his use of lacquer. He creates a
clash between the highly refined traditions that lacquer and calligraphy had historically
cultivated and his free, loose handling of both on a lowly, non-art support of cardboard.
Primitivism (Mingei and Mexico)
Hamada Shoji, Flower
Vase, glazed stoneware
Yoshida Hodaka, Ancient
People, 1956, color
woodblock print on paper
For at least a half-century leading up to World War II, Western modernists had
sought inspiration from what the West called “primitive” cultures. This impulse would
intensify during and just after the war when Yoshida Hodaka and other Japanese artist
took up this same practice.
Primitivists believed that they were uncovering a pure a-cultural source of human
expression. This impulse presumably existed all over the world, but polluting, civilizing
forces had constantly covered it over, differentiating cultures and separating people from
their common, biologically driven humanity. People in certain places in the world were
considered to be by nature and history more primitive, or at least had more access to
primitive roots than other places because of the way they led their lives or the way their
early cultures had been untouched by what primitivists regarded as civilizing forces.
So while primitivism was born out of a progressive politics that sought to discredit
and reverse Western, imperialism, it ended up perpetuating, often unwittingly, imperialist
ambitions and racism. Primitivists failed to recognize the pluralism of civilizing practices
in history and throughout the world. They homogenized the world into a dualism of
“civilized people” and “other,” with “other” usually being racially marked and
erroneously presumed to indulge in practices and values opposite of civilized people. The
primitivists were in search of something deep within themselves and had to go mentally
far away from home to find this elusive spirit, even though the find was usually not an
attribute of the place and culture where they located it. Partial evidence of primitivism’s
cultural construction is the way in which certain places and practices became favored
centers for the cultivation of primitivism.
Japan had already cultivated its own distinctive form of primitivism prior to World
War II with the pursuit of the mingei aesthetic, and this would have a resurgence after the
war in both Japan and the United States. “Mingei” refers to folk art aesthetics or, more
literally, “arts of the people.” It arose in explicit reaction to rapid industrialization and
growth of urban centers in both Japan and the U.S. and has almost always been a
phenomenon that people outside of Japan have viewed as a major Japanese aesthetic to a
greater degree than the Japanese themselves. Mingei can appear in any art form, but its
celebration of earthen values employed by rural people needing utilitarian objects and not
concerned with cultivation of aesthetics have long attracted potters to mingei aesthetics.
Hamada Shoji was one of the first Japanese artists to pursue it, but it has always had a
strong, Western, primitivizing foundation as well. One of its key, founding theorists was
the Hong Kong-born, British ceramicist Bernard Leach, with whom Hamada Shoji
studied and traveled in England in 1920. The two of them helped launch mingei at
Leach’s pottery works in St. Ives, Cornwall before they returned to Japan, where Leach
had already spent most of his adult life. Leach was very knowledgeable about the Arts
and Crafts movement. He proposed that Asian art could find its authentic character if it
stripped away cultivated aesthetics and outside influences and learned from simple
practices of potters in remote, rural areas of Korea and Japan. The notion that Japanese
were less cultured than Westerners and more in touch with primitive powers has always
been part of mingei’s mystique for Westerners and Japanese alike.
The Japanese government designated Hamada Shoji a national treasure in 1955, and
the vase by him in this exhibition was a gift from the government to Walter and Joan
Mondale when Walter Mondale was America’s ambassador to Japan. Shimaoka Tatsuzo
was Hamada Shoji’s prized student and his successor as a national treasure in this realm.
University of Minnesota Professor Emeritus Warren MacKenzie, a world renown mingei
potter who studied with Bernard Leach right after World War II, has traveled and studied
extensively in Japan. He and a number of his students have made Minnesota and nearby
Wisconsin a major mingei center.
Following World War II, Yoshida Hodaka became an avid world traveler. His travels
extended his father’s early interest in foreign sources and search for universal truths. This
journeying also countered the nationalism Hodaka had experienced leading up to the war
and the cultural triumphalism that occupying Americans cultivated as the Cold War
unfolded. He found inspiring places modernists deemed remote, rugged and full of
ancient mysteries. Mexico served this objective well, as his numerous trips to the country
and works such as Ancient People, 1956, with its haunting, mute representation of
abstracted, Pre-Columbian sculptural forms, demonstrates. Several works in the
exhibition reveal that Mexico was a favorite source of inspiration for various primtivists.
It helped launch Mexican Rufino Tamayo’s success in Paris and New York. In Poster
without Letters Tamayo layers the surface with a graffiti scrawl of the type primitivistic,
American modernist Aaron Siskind made a pilgrimage to explore in a set of photographs
he took that includes Mexico, 1955. The splotchy surface in the Tamayo print
commingles with other primitivizing sources drawn from Minoan and African sources.
Buddhism Reconsidered
Yoshida Hodaka, Buddhist
Statues, 1954, color
woodblock on paper
James Lee Byars, James Lee
Byars, exhibition catalogue,
1977
The new interest that various Japanese and American artists showed toward
Buddhism following World War II derives from primitivist impulses without being
primitivist per se. Buddhism began within a culture utilizing written texts and spread
throughout Asia among well-educated people on the basis of certain texts. At the same
time, its origins in Asia and its call for renunciation of worldly attachments distanced it
from Western modern life in ways that appealed to primitivists.
Yoshida Hodaka’s Buddhist Statues, part of his Buddhist series of prints, is probably
the most primitivistic of all the Buddhist-related works in this exhibition. It, like other
prints in his series, is a meditation on Kannon – Japanese, Bodhisattva imagery made
somewhat mysterious in the print by its abstract nature of the forms and the way some act
as translucent shrouds framing a central figure. Hodaka does not direct the viewer to
Buddhist practice, but instead creates a sense of mystery and longing for some ill-defined
sensibility that is more ancient and strangely universal than any specific practice or entity
found in modern life.
James Lee Byars represents the important set of American avant-garde artists
centered around John Cage who started exploring Zen Buddhism after World War II as
part of turning their backs on Western determinism and materialism. Many attended
lectures at Columbia University by the Japanese scholar D. T. Suzuki, who had been
translating Zen ideas to make them understood by Europeans and Americans since the
turn of the twentieth century. Most of the art Byars created consisted of small, delicate
gestures and was often ephemeral in keeping with his Buddhist beliefs. From 1957 to
1967, he lived off-and-on in Japan, mostly at a Buddhist monastery.
Anne Truitt became an improbable friend of his at that time when Newsweek made
her husband its chief Japanese correspondent and the family moved to Japan. Though she
worked hard to learn Japanese and develop more understanding of Japanese culture than
most Americans living there, she always felt estranged. Still, the curiously alive, palpable
mystery of this pioneering Minimalist’s purist abstractions elicits the same sense of Zenlike search for meaning beyond material existence found as a common feature in the
work of other American, austere abstractionists who took up Zen Buddhism around this
time.
A War-Torn World
Isamu Noguchi, Akari 5x
lamp, 1951
Yoshida Hodaka, Red Wall: Los Pueblos
in Mexico, 1992, photoetching and color
woodblock print on paper 1977
Much of the more important art created right after World War II displays the wounds
of that cataclysmic war itself. Its scars have endured to this day because of the questions
that this relatively new era of warring raised about modernity and human survival in the
face of what modern technologies have made possible. Nowhere did this change become
magnified more than through the destruction unleashed by the atomic bombs dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While modernity has conventionally measured progress by
technological advances, any number of artists and thinkers knowledgeable about
milestones in technology, and most notably the development and use of atomic weapons,
have charted a different path of inquiry that asks us to look at man’s destructive impulses
and respond with humility and atonement.
This was true for a number of abstractionists living through World War II, even those
working in the realm of photography, as Aaron Siskind did. The rough, scraped surfaces
with curious hieroglyphic marks on them captured in the series of photographs he took
that includes Mexico, 1955, metaphorically impart existential, apocalyptic lessons about
the war, specifically the Holocaust and world-wide destruction of people and places that
have continued after the major war following World War I, which was so destructive
people thought it would be “the war to end all wars” rather than the prelude to more
horrors.
The same interest emerges in the many prints of humble buildings or mere walls that
Yoshida Hodaka created throughout his career. These images conjure into existence the
many places he traveled and his admiration for humble folk. The walls he depicts are
often marred by the ravages of time, yet the edifices endure like archeological finds or the
buildings still standing in photographs of war-ravaged cities. These prints celebrate
human endurance as it can be witnessed among the humblest and most vulnerable of
people.
Isamu Noguchi similarly turned to the old Japanese tradition of paper lanterns, which
were largely a folk art in Japan by the 20th-century, when he devised his Akari lamps
shortly after the end of World War II. He traveled to Japan following the war eager to
atone for what his American countrymen had done in dropping the bombs at Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. He designed the Akari lamps to produce a soft, spiritually laden light as a
metaphorical contrast to the intense, devastating light an atomic bomb produces. (“Akari”
means “light,” and a glimmering form of light, in Japanese.) The war had taught him a
lesson in how humanity was loosing its way in the modern era. He worried that Japan
would be more susceptible to that because of the destruction it had experienced and the
specific brand of modernization America was imposing upon it. The Akari lamps had a
practical purpose of creating jobs, but they also produced work that kept an older, humble
paper lantern tradition and the humanism embodied in that tradition alive.
Yoko Ono came up with the Wish Tree concept as she pondered the senseless murder
of her husband John Lennon a decade earlier and all that the two of them had done for the
cause of peace in a world constantly generating wars, atrocities and more threatening
forms of mass destruction. It relates to certain ancient Buddhist and Japanese Shinto
practices, making a statement about how the impulse for a better world has been in
humanity since early times. She uses this work to entice people to think about their own
dreams and their relationship with other living things and resist the pitfalls of a modern,
mechanist world.
Pop Art and Culture
Major artists worldwide in the decade following World War II generally tended to
contemplate the world in apocalyptic terms. Whether in Europe, the United States or
Japan, they favored an expressive form of abstraction that seemed to embrace a state of
Existential chaos that had the potential to lead to a profound, new utopia. They held out
hope that the violence and chaos of the previous decades visible in their abstractions
would clean cultural slates, awaken all classes of people throughout the world to big
ideas, and produce a new era of equality and profundity. However, that was not how
history unfolded in either the United States or Japan. Economic booms of an
unprecedented scale, first in the United States and then in Japan, led to materialistic,
consumerist societies in love with mass media and the spectacles that modern life could
unleash. With each passing year, people increasingly felt liberated from previous
constraints and indulged relatively hedonistically in satiating the desires advertisers set
before them.
Artists and intellectuals were generally slow to acknowledge this reality, and Yoshida
Hodaka is one of the rare artists who crossed over from the one worldview to the other.
Most who embraced the new reality began their careers as Neo-Dadaists and Pop artists,
taking up this approach as a way of poking fun at the earlier generation. They replaced
the dark, somber colors of the abstractionists with bright, neon colors appropriated from
the world of commercial art. Figuration showed up again and even the nude that Western
abstraction had discredited, but she took on the attributes of sex symbols used to lure
consumers to movies and the growing trade in pornography.
As these last comments indicate, Pop Art poked fun at the high-minded, remote
Existentialism of the immediate postwar generation (in part by adopting the tools of mass
culture). Wherever Pop Art appeared, it also questioned in deeply ironic ways the mass
culture it celebrated. Few people realize that Pop Art originated in England. A Second
World War had reasserted the new importance of the middle class relative to the
aristocracy in winning modern wars and making modern society successful. At the same
time, the British artists and thinkers who set out to valorize middle-class life over older
aristocratic traditions fretted about growing Americanization of British culture fueled by
lingering American GIs, an influx of American products and mass media, and an
uncritical middle class eager to buy all that America had to sell.
This changing order, which involved not only class values but also global influence,
would pose an even greater dilemma for the Japanese. Remarkable economic success in
the 1960s fueled by a burgeoning electronics and then media industry wiped away
decades of privations and made the middle class economically and politically more
important than they had ever been. But, as much as various strata of Japanese reveled in
this development, they also worried about the flatness and hedonism it produced, relative
to traditional ways. They worried, too, about the extent to which people were mindlessly
adapting American goods and values introduced in this instance by military occupiers
from whom the Japanese had worked to free themselves.
These conflicted attitudes helps explain why Hodaka included the notion of
“mythologies” in the titles of a variety of his Pop Art works and why the imagery -- at
first glance so alluring through its attention-grabbing colors -- becomes more troubling as
one observes some of the things going on in scenes and the paucity of literal and
metaphorical depth. William Weege’s Venus Arrives in America demonstrates how these
same qualities can be seen in much American Pop Art, here resulting in a more lighthearted critique of middle class, American culture. For Japanese culture the changes
taking place had higher stakes and became a matter of intense political and cultural
debate within circles of artists and intellectuals on the left and right, as the dramatic
events surround Mishima Yukio’s art and life would prove. Mishima wrote profoundly
empathetic and insightful short stories about pop culture while rallying a political and
cultural call for traditional values. He and a small group of followers went so far in their
opposition to modern ways that they tried in 1970 to overthrow the government
militarily, after which he committed ritualistic suicide when they failed.
Fluxus
Akasegawa Genpei, One-Thousand-Yen Note Trial
poster, 1967, two-sided offset lithograph on paper
Fluxus was one of the more significant Neo-Dada responses to post-World War II
commercial culture. Small cadres of Fluxus artists sprouted up throughout the world
starting around 1960. While nearly all of them were tutored by art practices in New York
City, they often succeeded best by distancing themselves from this center of art and
consumerist culture. Following the lead of pioneering Dadaists, most notably Marcel
Duchamp, Fluxus artists observed how the art world tended to mirror the modern,
commercial world in ways that the avant-garde refused to admit. The price of works of
art as commodities kept growing as the measure of art’s “value.” Artists were becoming
celebrities, and use of the term “what’s in fashion” grew as a means of arguing about
different styles of art. Fluxus artists, along with other Neo-Dadists, rebelled against this.
They produced ephemeral works such as Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece that as a performance
was not a commodity. Seeking to break down what Neo-Dadaist Robert Rauschenberg
termed the “gap between art and life,” Fluxus creators made art that lived in space and
time, as the Cut Piece performances did, and required responses and participation by
those encountering the works and events.
While many of the Tokyo Fluxus artists, including Yoko Ono, began their Fluxus
experiments in New York in the circle of American, avant-garde composer John Cage,
Fluxus flourished especially well in Tokyo. Cage himself found Tokyo to be unusually
productive place for his own development when he made a prolonged visit there at the
request of several Tokyo Fluxus artists. Tokyo had less fixed expectations about its art
world than New York, so Fluxus agitations against fixity had more impact. At the same
time, an older, deeper respect for the role of artists in society made Fluxus critiques of
culture more poignant in Japan than in the United States as Akasegawa Genpei’s work
would prove.
Akasegawa helped found the Hi Red Center group at a time of growing political
frustration in Japan among the left and right. Enjoying their new economic success,
Japanese people became more complacent about newer, Western conceived social and
political attitudes that American occupational governance had helped initiate and the
Japanese government implemented. At the same time, disquietude grew in Japan about
America’s increasing Asian Cold War activity and its hypocritical desire for Japan to
remain demilitarized and a nuclear-free nation following the occupation, while
Americans covertly brought ships with nuclear weapons into its Okinawa navel base.
Worried about both internal and world affairs as communist China grew in importance,
the Japanese government was reluctant to change too much when in January 1963
Akasegawa somewhat unwittingly stirred the pot. As a critique of the growing
commercialization of society and art in particular, he sent out announcements to an
exhibition in the form of clearly bogus, outsized 1,000-yen notes printed on just one side.
Feeling a special need to keep control over its currency in particular, the government
began investigating him for counterfeiting. An incredulous Akasegawa initially thought
that the government would realize its mistake and back off. He began treating the whole
Kafkaesque investigation as a Fluxus event and continued doing so even when the
government brought charges and then spent several years pursuing the matter in court.
The poster in the exhibition is one of his Fluxus creations related to the trial, which
ended, to the shock of many, with him being convicted and sentenced to several years in
jail because he so challenged governmental authority.
Fluxus emerged as one of the few genuinely avant-garde art movements of this time.
Modernists tended to do little more than chuckle at Fluxus artists’ antics. They failed to
comprehend how skillfully and importantly Fluxus artists were deconstructing the
modernists’ perpetuation of the mass, consumerist cultural system that they claimed to
disdain. While Fluxus would do little to change the art world in the United States at that
time, it set in motion a postmodern revolt against modernism in Germany, where Joseph
Beuys began his international career as part of Fluxus, and in Japan. This would have
major ramifications more than a decade later for the end of modernism’s importance and
the success of a more international, postmodernist turn in art and culture.
Japan and the Pop Era Revival of Printmaking
World Wide
Kananginak Pootoogook, Paniq –
Bull Caribou , stonecut print on paper
The Yoshida family of printmakers represents Japan’s longstanding tradition of
cultivating excellence in prints. That tradition would be a boon to artists throughout the
world once Pop Art revived printmaking as a significant art form following its decline in
the United States due to Abstract Expressionism’s success. Abstract Expressionism
prized art produced when an individual confronted the universe existentially, producing
in an instant the person’s unmediated thoughts and response. Artists in the United States
and Europe who pursued this look resisted the conformity and mechanization of their
burgeoning industrial societies. These artists prized uniqueness and evidence of a humangenerated creative process. Thus, the collaborative and mass produced character of
printmaking became discredited as a major art form in the United States right after the
war.
Pop artists, on the other hand, with their embrace of mass culture and skepticism of
the trappings of Abstract Expressionism, delighted in reversing the Abstract
Expressionists’ value system. They started to employ print processes to make prints and
paintings as well. They initially experimented with commercial and mass media print
processes such as screenprinting and photography-based methods as seen in William
Weege’s Venus Arrives in the USA. Over time, they kept expanding their printmaking
repertoire and helped foster a renewal in printmaking throughout the art world. As
printmaking became more important world wide, artists increasingly turned to Japan for
ideas and expertise.
When Jasper Johns, regarded as perhaps the most important artist and printmaker of
the Pop Art generation, sought certain subtle effects in his screenprints, he usually
worked with Simca Print Artists. Although located in New York, a Japanese master
printer, Hiroshi Kawanishi ran it, and he always flew two other Japanese print technicians
to New York to work on the many Jasper Johns prints that Simca produced and
published. Johns also had firsthand knowledge of Japan. He visited there for sustained
periods of time starting when he was a GI during the Korean War, returning in the Spring
of 1963, when he lived in Tokyo and created a number of important assemblages. As the
title and feel of Usuyuki (Light Snow) in this exhibition demonstrates, his interest in
Japanese aesthetics has been much more than a matter of technical processes, though
technical excellence has drawn many printmakers from throughout the world to Japan
since the 1960s.
Japanese skill in translating technical prowess into aesthetic excellence helped Inuit
artists as well produce much sought after prints. Continental American advisers prompted
Inuit traditional stone carvers in the 1950s and 1960s to Inuit to try their hand at
printmaking so that they could financially benefit from this way of making art. But,
Anglo-Candians and Americans could offer only limited tutoring in this realm. As Inuit
sought to make better prints, a number of them, including Kananginak Pootoogook,
decided to study in Japan, and pass on what they learned from Japanese artists to fellow
Inuit.
The ties between Japanese and American printmaking practices also flowed the other
direction, as Yoshida Hodaka’s Mythology in the Sky demonstrates. It combines
traditional Japanese color woodblock technique with commercial, photoscreenprint
processes American Pop Artists sprung on the art world. Hodaka’s combination of these
techniques produce the type of thought provoking time-warp postmodern artists have
fruitfully explored since then, which American Pop Artists played a pivotal role in
initiating.
Identity Reconsidered in the Postmodern Era
The last section of this exhibition contains art by the most recent generation of
Japanese and Japanese-American artists. Each explores matters of identity and either
overtly or inadvertently contests modernists’ ideas about identity that became so
important right after the World War II. Some do this quite playfully. Modernists sought
the existence of a biologically conceived, universal “man” allegedly free from cultural
constraints and prejudices. If he, and it was always “he” as the prototype, had any
geographical origins, they were presented as natural rather than cultural in origin. Primal
origins could also be conceived racially in this age that still believed in race being a
biological phenomenon.
Starting in the 1960s, postmodern thinkers began to question these natural law
premises of origins as modern ploy Western culture created as cultural constructions to
hide even from itself its imperialist ambitions. Groups that have experienced minority
status in the United States and in the world arena, including Japanese-Americans and
Japanese, have pursued the unmasking of this cultural construction and its impact with
special skill and insight. Analyzing presumptively universal norms embedded in both
high and mass culture (in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, place, etc.), they have
questioned the degree to which all human claims are culturally constructed and involve
thus the positioning of people socially, geographically within changing, rather than
natural order, structures of power.
Place
Ayomi Yoshida, Touches , 1987,
color woodblock print on paper
The first set of works in this section involves landscapes and contests modernists’
notions of geographical determinism. Each artist investigates in different ways “place”
functions. Place has long been assumed to be immutable and iconic yet it can be
manipulated and used through representations as a vessel for diverse ideas and values. Is
the reverence for certain places in Japan a means for knowing Japan better, the way the
older Hiroshige III print with Mount Fuji in it would have viewers believe? Jiro
Takamatsu causes us to pause and contemplate how the images of places themselves have
achieved this iconic status and a certain assumed view or appearance becomes more
powerful in its expected form than the place itself. Noriko Fururnishi, who currently lives
and works in Los Angeles, uses computer manipulation to create a hanging scroll effect
(a traditional Japanese landscape form imported from China) to interrogate an American
West bulldozers have dug into. Her work questions whether people see the world the
same way no matter when and where we live. This work reminds us that we always carry
cultural and aesthetic assumptions with us as we travel the world and hence see place
through the lens of different sets of cultural knowledge. Zon Ito asks even more troubling
questions about the degree to which people have constructed notions of beautiful,
familiar landscapes over time, using that process to mask a growing estrangement from
nature itself. Such aestheticization of nature and cultural valorization of place provides
cover for the modern mistreatment of the environment, which this art critiques.
Personhood
Roger Shimomura, Mix and Match I,
2001, color lithograph on paper
The last set of works approach identity in terms of personhood and the complex set of
forces and choices that individuals negotiate in expressing who they are in the world
relative to norms that prove far more culturally-determined and malleable than Western
modernists had. Most of the artists have made this point explicitly but not Ayomi
Yoshida given that her work is so abstract and involves patterns that come and go in
nature, through the art-making process and that people wear, remove and cherish in
changing ways throughout time. Her Touches brings the exhibition full circle back to the
Yoshida family and abstraction. Unlike her father, Ayomi derives her abstract imagery
from ephemeral natural patterns such as waves and patterns of light or from older textile
patterns that usually marked the gender and status of those who wore them. Sometimes
she employs some combination of both, along with patterning generated by her own
working process. The last echoes her father’s quest to use an artist’s own sense of self as
a compass for assessing the world, though their abstractions are in most ways different in
appearance and character. His abstractions appear fully self-generated, while hers
reference obscure established patterns. These patterns often include distinct cultural
sources that few Japanese and fewer patrons in a global art world would consciously
recognize, though find compelling. They conjure up codes we ascribe to patterns or seek
in nature but that have no fixed meaning. The patterns express the transient, though
alluring, way we create and re-create identity in codes and patterns unlike the dreams of a
permanent, universal order transcending culture and human existence that her father
searched for in his chaotic, post World War II world.
Suggested Readings
Japanese Art Since World War II
Alexandra Munroe, Japanese Art after 1945: Scream against the Sky. New York: Harry
N. Abrams, Inc. in association with the Yokohama Museum of Art, The Japan
Foundation, The Guggenheim Museum, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
1994.
Takashi Murakami. Superflat. Tokyo: Madora Shuppan, 2000.
David Elliott. Bye Bye Kitty !!!: between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese
Art. New York and New Haven: Japan Society and Yale University Press, 2011.
Charles Merewether with Rika Iezumi Hiro, eds. Art, Anit-Art, Non-Art:
Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan, 1950-1970. Los Angeles:
The Getty Research Institute, 2007.
American Artists and Japan
Alexandra Munroe. The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989.
New York: The Guggenheim Museum, 2009
Gordon H. Chang, senior editor. Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970. Standford:
Stanford University Press, 2008.
Yoshidas
Sandra L. Lipshultz, editor. A Japanese Legacy: Four Generations of Yoshida Family
Artists. Minneapolis and Chicago: The Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Art Media
Resources, Ltd., 2002
Eugene M. Skibbe. Yoshida Hodaka: The Magic of Art. Edina: Seascape Publications,
1997.
List of Works Illustrated
Yoshida Hodaka, Nonsense Mythology, 1969. Screenprint on paper. Collection Flaten Art
Museum, gift of Eugene ’52 and Margaret ’53 Skibbe.
Yoshida Hodaka, Universe, 1961. Color woodblock print on paper. Collection Flaten Art
Museum, gift of Eugene ’52 and Margaret ’53 Skibbe.
Yoshida Hodaka, White Suite A, 1954. Color woodblock print on paper. Collection Flaten
Art Museum, gift of Eugene ’52 and Margaret ’53 Skibbe.
Hamada Shoji, Flower Vase, n.d., Glazed stoneware with ladle poured pattern. Collection
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, gift of Joan Mondale.
Yoshida Hodaka, Ancient People, 1956. Color woodblock print on paper. Collection
Flaten Art Museum, gift of Eugene ’52 and Margaret ’53 Skibbe.
Yoshida Hodaka, Buddhist Statues, 1954. Color woodblock print on paper. Collection
Flaten Art Museum, gift of Eugene ’52 and Margaret ’53 Skibbe.
James Lee Byars, James Lee Byars, 1977. Black tissue paper in gold cardboard box
exhibition catalog. Collection Walker Art Center Minneapolis, Walker Art Center Library
Collection.
Isamu Noguchi, Akari 5x, 1951. Paper and metal lamp. Private collection.
Yoshida Hodaka, Red Wall: Los Pueblos in Mexico, 1993. Photoetching and color
woodblock pint on paper. Collection Eugene ’52 and Margaret ’53 Skibbe.
Akasegawa Genpei, One-Thousand-Yen Note Trial Poster, 1967. Two-sided offset
lithograph on paper. Collection Walker Art Center Minneapolis, T.B. Walker Acquisition
Fund, 2009.
Kananginak Pootoogook, Paniq – Bull Caribou, 1993. Stone cut print on paper.
Collection Flaten Art Museum, gift of the Sharon K. Patten ’66 estate.
Ayomi Yoshida, Touches, 1987. Color woodblock print on paper. Collection Eugene ’52
and Margaret ’53 Skibbe.
Roger Shimomura, Mix and Match I, 2001. Color lithograph on paper. Collection The
Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota. Museum purchase with
funds from Ralph Wells.