We, human beings love to determine subjects or objects unknown and unfamiliar to us. When we meet something we haven’t seen, feel, heard, smell or taste before, we all have the urge to understand it and to solve it. We love solving mysteries. In order to do so, we would do anything to question, to dig into or to experiment to get results that satisfy and easy us in every possible way. In simple, we are afraid of not knowing because each of us feeds on knowledge and we will not stop until we find out why’s, what’s, who’s, how’s, when’s, and where’s. But sometimes, we cannot seem to find answers to everything, and then we become frustrated and begin to debate between one another about each side’s personal opinion to come to a common ground that both can agree on. This pretty much happens all the time from past to present and to the future, people from each period reacts and acts differently. Thus, the answers are not consistent; they change from time to time, to fit in each timeline, or should I say, to fit in the society.
For many years, artists and critical thinkers tried to reposition the wide-ranging cultural discourse about contemporary Asian art in Asia. The interaction between the cultures of Asia and the West is one of the most important events in the world history. Before modernity, before both East and West have a deep interest in uniting artistic thoughts, religions, and cultural differences, they are two distinctive worlds unknown to each other. Yet in a very indirect and subtle way, Eastern concepts did eventually come to influence the eighteenth-century Western taste and naturally be influenced as well. It was that time when East and West have been slightly conscious of each other’s aims and artistic ideals. They have written and compared each other to themselves about the expression of the great civilization they admired.
With the rise of Asia’s capitalist economies in the 1950s, artistic concepts and cultures from each region took place into a wider Western world. The most visible prove is the pace of construction of different cities from countries such as Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea, and Taiwan, following up are China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Philippine that caught the Western’s attention. Asia’s urban explosion had opened a bigger window to Western countries when electronic media is starting to be used vastly for communication.1 This took decades of confrontations and conflicts about how to actually identify Asian art to fit in the global arena.
In this essay, I have chosen two artworks that are of particular significance to my practice to discuss. They are Work created by Jirō Yoshihara in 1965 (fig. 1) and Cercle 13-8 done by Takesada Matsutani in 2013 (fig. 2). Jirō Yoshihara is a Japanese painter and is well known as the leader of Gutai Art Association (Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai) – one of the most important avant-garde art movement representatives of Japan’s post-war art world. Whereas Takesada Matsutani was a key member of the ‘second generation’ of the Gutai Art Association, his artistic language is hugely influenced by Jirō Yoshihara as Matsutani was one of Jirō’s disciple. The relationship between these protagonists is able to continue inspiring viewers and artists all around the globe and carries the Gutai spirit for decades or maybe even centuries. Both artists are from the Gutai group, so I will be focusing on Gutai Art Association as an example of Asian art movement into the Western world.
Jirō Yoshihara was born in 1905 into a wealthy family which held the merchant business of vegetable oil in Osaka. He did not receive any education during childhood but somehow manages to take his doctor’s degree in economics at the University of Kansai in 1928. In the same year after completing his education, he held his first solo exhibition showing some of his earliest works such as Fish, Morning Glories and Others. Through this show, he began his career and quickly established himself as a modernist artist of abstraction and Surrealism. He was attracted and influenced by the work of Giorgio de Chirico. Yoshihara later joined the Nika-kai group, a group of fauvist style painters, as a figurative painter and later as an abstract painter. Although his surrealist manner became popular among Japanese avant-garde art during the 1930s, he was not satisfied with his own style. Moderately, he changed his style to pure abstract painting adopting the painting style of Art informel in the 1950s.
In late 1954, the Gutai Art Association (Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai) was founded under the guidance of Yoshihara together with Shozo Shimamoto in Ashiya, west of Osaka. They are both inspired and attracted to Zen calligraphy and famous action painter Jackson Pollock. Despite all the admiration for Pollock, Yoshihara who was once a businessman knew he had to be original in order to break out into the barrier of international. To preserve the exquisite tradition of art in Japan and the same time having a big impact in modern art, Yoshihara understood the importance of individualism in art. Hence, his motto “Never imitate others: do what no one has done before.” is always mentioned in his teachings. His words inspired many of the members of the association like Chiyu Uemae, Kazuo Shiraga, Atsuko Tanaka, Saburo Murakami, Sadamasa Motonaga and more.
The name Gutai was suggested by Shozo Shimamoto, ‘gu’ meaning ‘tool’, and ‘tai’ meaning ‘body’ was combined to reflect the dedication relationship between body and matter. Yoshihara considers it to mean ‘concreteness’ and ‘embodiment’. Gutai emerged at a time when Japanese modernist artists were struggling to rediscover their voices after the war. The wealthy Jirō Yoshihara had funded many of the group’s projects and even built a library of art related resources from all over the world to keep updated with the modern art world. He started receiving students in 1947 that was before founding Gutai Art Association. As a leader and a teacher, Yoshihara was extremely active in stressing about how and why to modernize the Japanese traditional arts like calligraphy, ink painting, pottery, and so on. It was not just a matter of changing or abandoning traditions but rather creating something entirely new, at the same time was able to forge an identity that was both modern and Japanese.2 He was specifically strict about the Gutai members’ creations, their works must be filtered and approved by him and himself only before revealing themselves to the public.
To strengthen his teachings and have a clear explanation to the modern art world, Yoshihara wrote the Gutai manifesto in December 1956. The manifesto emphasizes that Gutai art does not alter the materials or matters but brings it to life by fusing the human spirit together with objects. Materials such as paint, clay, marble and more, which are used by human hands to demonstrate forms and shapes are silenced. The Gutai manifesto claims that materials and matters have their own voices but were never listened, seen or acknowledged by viewers and artists. They have their own characteristics and sometimes are able to speak more loudly than images. As Jirō Yoshihara wrote in the manifesto:
“Under the cloak of an intellectual aim, the materials have been completely murdered and can no longer speak to us. Lock these corpses into their tombs. … Art is the home of the creative spirit, but never until now has the spirit created the material. … Certainly the spirit has always filled art with life, but this life will finally die as the times change. ”3
Saying materials that were used as tools and were in disguise with artificial make-ups were murdered shows how concerned Yoshihara was in lifting the spirits of lifeless objects. Calling them corpses that should be buried suggested that it was time to free the materials from their sufferings of being objectified. It is time to reach out and communicate with them as they have behavior that will surprise us in many ways.
We, human beings love to determine subjects or objects unknown and unfamiliar to us. When we meet something we haven’t seen, feel, heard, smell or taste before, we all have the urge to understand it and to solve it. We love solving mysteries. In order to do so, we would do anything to question, to dig into or to experiment to get results that satisfy and easy us in every possible way. In simple, we are afraid of not knowing because each of us feeds on knowledge and we will not stop until we find out why’s, what’s, who’s, how’s, when’s, and where’s. But sometimes, we cannot seem to find answers to everything, and then we become frustrated and begin to debate between one another about each side’s personal opinion to come to a common ground that both can agree on. This pretty much happens all the time from past to present and to the future, people from each period reacts and acts differently. Thus, the answers are not consistent; they change from time to time, to fit in each timeline, or should I say, to fit in the society.
For many years, artists and critical thinkers tried to reposition the wide-ranging cultural discourse about contemporary Asian art in Asia. The interaction between the cultures of Asia and the West is one of the most important events in the world history. Before modernity, before both East and West have a deep interest in uniting artistic thoughts, religions, and cultural differences, they are two distinctive worlds unknown to each other. Yet in a very indirect and subtle way, Eastern concepts did eventually come to influence the eighteenth-century Western taste and naturally be influenced as well. It was that time when East and West have been slightly conscious of each other’s aims and artistic ideals. They have written and compared each other to themselves about the expression of the great civilization they admired.
With the rise of Asia’s capitalist economies in the 1950s, artistic concepts and cultures from each region took place into a wider Western world. The most visible prove is the pace of construction of different cities from countries such as Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea, and Taiwan, following up are China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Philippine that caught the Western’s attention. Asia’s urban explosion had opened a bigger window to Western countries when electronic media is starting to be used vastly for communication.1 This took decades of confrontations and conflicts about how to actually identify Asian art to fit in the global arena.
In this essay, I have chosen two artworks that are of particular significance to my practice to discuss. They are Work created by Jirō Yoshihara in 1965 (fig. 1) and Cercle 13-8 done by Takesada Matsutani in 2013 (fig. 2). Jirō Yoshihara is a Japanese painter and is well known as the leader of Gutai Art Association (Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai) – one of the most important avant-garde art movement representatives of Japan’s post-war art world. Whereas Takesada Matsutani was a key member of the ‘second generation’ of the Gutai Art Association, his artistic language is hugely influenced by Jirō Yoshihara as Matsutani was one of Jirō’s disciple. The relationship between these protagonists is able to continue inspiring viewers and artists all around the globe and carries the Gutai spirit for decades or maybe even centuries. Both artists are from the Gutai group, so I will be focusing on Gutai Art Association as an example of Asian art movement into the Western world.