Ikuo Hirayama: solace on the silk road

Ikuo Hirayama clearly represents how the Japanese like to see — and project — themselves. His paintings, located in the strong traditions of nihonga (Japanese-style painting), are unmistakably Japanese, but they look outwards to the rest of the world and express the spirit of peaceful cooperation and appreciation of our common world heritage that is a popular theme on Japanese TV travel programs. For this, he has been noticed and honored abroad, most notably when he was made a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador in 1988.

This must be one reason why "Ikuo Hirayama: A Retrospective — Pilgrimage for Peace," a major show of his paintings at the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, has been so well attended. Others include his skill as an artist, as well as how his career touches on themes that are central to postwar Japan's sense of itself — redemption, regeneration and respect for the past.

The story dramatically opens with Hirayama, born in 1930, witnessing the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a junior high-school student mobilized for the war effort. In his autobiography he described the bombing, which he was lucky to survive, as "the greatest mistake mankind ever made." It had an undeniably enormous impact on him, but it was his inability to face it directly that shaped much of his artistic career.

After graduating from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1952, Hirayama became a disciple of nihonga painter Seison Maeda. Like many painters who felt the threat of social chaos in the post-World War II period — and the criticism that nihonga was out of touch with reality — Hirayama originally created scenes that emphasized everyday life's traditional aspects and order. But these early works are not included in the exhibition, as his ultimate style lay in the opposite direction.

In 1959, while suffering from an illness caused by radiation from the A-bomb, he painted scenes based on Buddhist themes, such as "The Transmission of Buddhism" (1959). Buddhist subjects gave him the freedom to paint symbolically, abstractly or figuratively, and develop a luminous, lyrical style characterized by muted-but-glowing colors, unclear lines and ambiguous forms.

Compared to the great canon of Christian art, Buddhism, in purely artistic terms, lags far behind. This is partly the result of an otherworldliness that puts little value on the realms of sense and "illusion," and partly the effect of a stoicism that eschews passion and drama. Hirayama's Buddhist works, though, show the marks of a trip he made to Europe in the early '60s to study Western religious art. "Fantasy of Nirvana" (1961) and "The Jetavana Monastery" (1981) have an element of the religious dramas more typical of Christian Renaissance paintings.

While Japan was in the throes of rampant modernization and materialism, Hirayama headed in the opposite direction, going back to the roots of Japanese culture and spirituality. He traced it to its sources in China and India, as the scholar Tenshin Okakura, one of the founders of the nihonga movement, had done in the 19th century when Japan faced the first onslaught of Westernization. This meant that Hirayama went looking for Japan in the wilds of Central Asia, as he developed a fascination for the Silk Road and the seventh-century Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who spent 17 years traveling between Tang Dynasty China and India in search of Sanskrit sutras.

The works from Hirayama's extensive travels around Asia form the largest part of the exhibition. In the bleakness of the landscapes with their ruins, there is a feeling he was facing up to the cataclysm he witnessed at Hiroshima.

"Glowing Ruins in Turkestan" (1970) shows Bamiyan, the famous Buddhist site destroyed by Genghis Khan, and finished off by the Taliban, as a scene of desolation. Despite this, it is infused with a light that seems to recall the history of the place and its people.

The paintings of scenes along the Silk Road often have the sublimity and spirituality that comes naturally to the vast and the ancient. This reflects that, in essence, spirituality is about how far we can remove ourselves from the here and now. In visiting and painting such vistas, there's a palpable sense of Hirayama finding the perspective that allowed him to look once again at his country and the unbearable events of Aug. 6, 1945.

In "The Glorious Imperial Palace of Fujiwara-kyo" (1969) the grandeur and simplicity of his Silk Road paintings are transposed to Japan, as the great city glows golden among the greenery — a vast, living Utopia rather than the mix of petty hopes, dreams and irritations that make up any city.

The vision he nurtured in Central Asia allowed him to paint what his art had been slowly moving toward for decades. "The Holocaust of Hiroshima" (1979) avoids the hysterics and shrill condemnation in other works dealing with the atrocities of the 20th-century, such as Picasso's "Guernica" (1937).

In Hirayama's work, the red inferno fills six panels above a suggestion of the Hiroshima skyline. Painted in rich, soft waves of powdered pigment with occasional flecks of gold, it becomes, surprisingly, a thing of beauty. Riding in the flames is Acalanatha, the Buddhist deity whose function is to destroy delusion. As well as representing the integrity of the longstanding Japanese culture, the painting shows the new maturity found in postwar Japan.

"Ikuo Hirayama: A Retrospective — Pilgrimage for Peace" ran till October 21, 2007 at the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo

Japan Times
September 27, 2007

Read More...

Superflat Paper Tiger: The Art of Takashi Murakami

Japanese art has two compartments. First, there is the art that exists largely within a Japanese context. Then there is the art that, somehow or other, finds its way onto the international stage, and, by so doing, becomes representative of the country. Interestingly, much of the art in the first category consists of a slavish though skillful cribbing of foreign styles, as well as traditional art created with little thought for a wider market.

Japanese art that has been able to transcend the narrow confines of the domestic market and achieve a wide foreign audience has also usually been traditional: Hokusai and Hiroshige for example. But in this category you can occasionally find examples of non– traditional art that, for one reason or another, has managed to make the transition from local to international.

Chief among these rare success stories is Takashi Murakami. Running to May 2009, “© Murakami,” a major retrospective of his work is now touring the US, with further stops scheduled in Germany and Spain. This exhibition will further strengthen the impression that here is a Japanese artist with mass overseas appeal who isn’t some 18th–century woodblock carver in a kimono.

A lavishly illustrated book–cum–catalog has been published to accompany this series of exhibitions. The five lengthy essays included in the text are designed to help you understand why Murakami has succeeded where so many others have failed, but only if you read between the lines, because exhibition catalogues are hardly disinterested and impartial documents.

This makes this book a delight for those who like deconstructing their language and looking for hidden subtexts. As with much art writing, there is plenty of impressive–sounding, but vacuous, open–ended language. The Director’s Foreword for example invokes the usual adventurous clichés about art that goes “beyond its traditional boundaries,” and praises Murakami for being “revelatory” and “transformative,” without bothering to hint at what he might be revealing or transforming.

Such laudations might prompt you to take a look at the art itself. As the pictures show, Murakami creates large cartoonish canvases in acrylic and plastic sculptures, both of which have a pristine manufactured look, as if the products of some Disneyesque production line.

This is no accident. One of the points made in the far–ranging essay “Flat Boy vs. Skinny: Takashi Murakami and the Battle for Japan” by British media theorist Dick Hebdige, is that Murakami has taken Andy Warhol’s concept of the ‘art factory’ and made it a reality. According to its website, Kaikai Kiki, the art production company that executes Murakami’s artistic visions, employs roughly 50 people in its Tokyo headquarters and 20 people in its New York office and studio. This has enabled Murakami to extend his ‘Business Art’ into many areas, including the manufacturing and marketing of figurines based on his art and designs for the international luggage brand Louis Vuitton.

But if Murakami’s art operates on an industrial scale that has more in common with Disney than Warhol, there is certainly nothing ‘Disneyesque’ about the centerpieces of the exhibition: the otaku–influenced “Hiropon” (1997), a 71–inch tall acrylic fiberglass figurine of a naked young girl, squeezing what looks like a skipping rope of milk from her enormous breasts, and the host–boy–inspired “My Lonesome Cowboy” (1998) a male equivalent that creates a lasso from his ejaculate.

In his essay “Making Murakami,” the exhibition’s chief curator, Paul Schimmel draws an analogy between the dynamic liquid aspects of these works and that of Hokusai’s “Great Wave” from “The Thirty-Six Views of Fuji.”

One of the problems of contemporary art is that it demands to be judged on its own terms, without any transcendent standard of excellence or taste. The problem becomes more pronounced in the case of an artist like Murakami as we are thrown off balance by its strangeness or get caught up in the enthusiasm with which it is treated by critics reluctant to tackle the complex interlinked phenomena of his ouvre by imposing familiar standards that might backfire. In essence, this is Orientalism applied backwards and often gives Murakami a critical free ride.

Murakami’s art may be ‘kawaii’ (cute), amusing, and even occasionally breathtaking, but there is also much to criticize in its artificiality, repetitiveness, smugness, and its distasteful reliance upon ‘otaku’ (geek) culture. The fact that it largely escapes more rigorous censure is a testament to Murakmi’s ultimate skill in understanding and manipulating the international art market and its intelligentsia. The key in this is his concept of “Superflat,” a variable concept that serves to mystify his creations and protect them from normal Western art criticism.

But just what is “Superflat”? Dick Hebdige’s essay nails down its defining characteristics. These include: (1) the flatness found in traditional Japanese painting; (2) “decentering decorative” effects, also from traditional Japanese art; (3) the lack of Western distinctions, like art/craft or high art/ low art; (4) the flatness found in digital imaging; and (5) “the ground-zero flattening of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the nuclear strikes of 1945.”

The last aspect is of particular interest. As we learn form Paul Schimmel’s essay, Murakami’s mother was living in the Western Japanese city of Kokura in 1945 when a B-29 bomber set out to obliterate it with the second A–bomb of the war. Only an accident of weather deflected the bomber from its original target to Nagasaki.

Looking at Murakami’s “Superflat” as Hebdige does, by specifying its salient features, is revealing. The demystified concept loses its power and we realize that it lacks any real aesthetic or philosophical merit. Instead, it emerges as a connotatative system designed to evoke a tolerant or even apologetic response from liberal Western collectors, curators, and art critics. It certainly has this effect on Hebdige himself. Despite providing a useful dissection of Superflat, his essay eulogizes the artist. But Hebdige does enough to show us how the machine works.

Points (1) and (2) arouse the veneration due to any traditional ethnic art style, but, as “My Lonesome Cowboy” so blatantly shows, this is not a veneration that Murakami himself shares, as this work would clearly horrify or embarrass any traditional Japanese artist. Point (3) makes a claim for moral superiority by contrasting the elite categories imposed by past systems of Western art with Japanese art’s apparent democratic lack of them. But the truth is that the Japanese arts have their own labyrinthine grades of distinction, forms of snobbishness, and exclusive in–groups that more than make up for the simple absence of a craft/art distinction. Point (4) makes the point that Murakami’s art is somehow cutting edge and futuristic by linking it to Japan’s high tech industries, although what exactly is high tech about acrylic paint and plastic is hard to see.

Point (5) is the most interesting, both because it is the most potent in its effect of creating an aura of critical invulnerability around Murakami’s art, and because, once looked at, it turns out to be artistically irrelevant. Like a quickly mumbled absurd non sequitur, it is slipped in, in the hope that it won’t attract too much direct attention. But Murakami comes back to it a lot.

In paintings like “Time Bokan – pink” (2001), one of many variations of a death’s head mushroom cloud ‘sampled’ from a 1970s anime series, Murakami is clearly invoking the spirit of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By doing this he seems to be addressing the West’s art intelligentsia thus: “Oh yeh, and your lot almost dropped an A–bomb on my mum, so cut me some slack, okay?”

Decoded in this way, “Superflat” is revealed to be a paper tiger protecting a lot of badly conceived and highly overrated art.

Kansai Time Out
March 2008

Read More...