Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Zon Ito

Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Zon Ito

by John McGee

Zon Ito, Traveling in The Shallows, 2000, embroidery on fabric, wood panel, 90x135cm
(Images courtesy Watari-Um Museum and the artist)

On a recent Sunday afternoon, Watari-Um Museum looked, and smelled, like an after-school art class. In front of pink walls covered with hundreds of small pig drawings, kids and teenagers painted orange juice onto paper. When warmed over a hot plate, the juice evaporated, leaving blobby golden brown images of imaginary animals and filling the museum with the sweet smell of burning OJ. 

Artist Zon Ito (b. 1971), the master of the workshop, is showing similar paintings as part of his first solo museum exhibition. Rather than animals, BBQ (2003), the series of small, toasted OJ paintings on paper by the 2001 Yokohama Triennale alumnus, shows close-ups of weeds and dirt. 

Fish, skulls, tree stumps, waterfalls and other natural elements are Ito’s recurring motifs. The work in this show, made from 2000-2003 (about half is new), incorporates them into large cutouts in red vinyl, a short animated film made with his wife, artist Ryoko Aoki, and 20 of the pieces he is best known for, colorful embroidery “drawings.” 

The Kyoto-based artist dismisses traditional drawing as too fast. He likes to work slowly and think. So with a literal push and pull, he sketches his stutter-step outlines one stitch at a time. Some of the embroideries are stretched and hung on walls like paintings. Others drop from the ceiling like banners or shaped tapestries. 

Zon Ito, The End of the Neighborhood,
2000, embroidery on fabric, wood panel,
115x85cm

Ito, which coincidentally means “thread” (though in different kanji), doesn’t sew the tight, machine-made embroidery of a Boy Scout patch. His silver, pink and blue lines are rough and tactile, definitely handmade. Jumpy dots and dashes flutter a Morse code that fuses into an image, then simultaneously breaks apart.

This volatility increases with Ito’s surrealist collaging. The End of the Neighborhood (2000) is a portrait of a big-haired woman on red fabric. But her bouffant is really a tiger lounging over the top of her head with a forest and river rising up out of its back. Her eyes are squawking birds. Similarly, overlapping outlines of brown trees, a blue river and green grass in The Sidetrack Belt (2003) come together as the profile of a large rabbit on an olive drab background. Not all the pictures have this Arcimboldo effect. Some are only collections of things, like the intermingled weeds found in the three Vacant Lot (2003) pieces on shaped fabric. 

Sound is another overlay. Whistles and lonely guitar strums, the soundtrack from the collaborative animation Children of Vains (2003), call down from the top floor of the museum. For approximately four minutes, the film brings Ito’s concatenations to life through meandering hand-drawn segues. Images constantly morph—a skull splits into a mountainside, a tree begets a bird. 

Tiny doubutsu (animal) drawings, the roots of the above workshop, have a related magic. By reorienting the katakana characters of animal names, new ones are born. A tora (tiger) becomes a “rato” (a rat-like critter with stripes), a kaeru (frog) a “karue.”

Craft-based alchemy is Ito’s theme. He mixes unstable compounds that mystically appear and disappear or float in a hermaphroditic in-between. This show, too, is energetic but out-of-focus, more cluttered studio or laboratory than tidy museum. Those who get into Ito’s world will really feel in the zone. Those who don’t may feel the sensory overload is hiding a thread drawn too thin.

This exhibition was held Oct-Nov 2003 at Watari-Um Museum of Contemporary Art in Jingumae, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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