Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Time of My Life: Art with a Youthful Spirit

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

Time of My Life: Art with a Youthful Spirit

by John McGee

Torawao Nakagawa, nothing has started and nothing has been lost, 2003, 
oil on canvas, collection of the artist (Images courtesy Tokyo Opera City 
Art Gallery)

On January 29, 1974, Fumio Nambata fell off a ferry into the Seto Inland Sea and died. The 32 year-old artist left behind more than 2,000 works. 

Painter Toshio Arimoto was 38 when he died in 1985. 

"Time of My Life" makes an awkward connection between the idiosyncratic paintings these two created in their short lives and a supposedly similar "youthful spirit" found in Japanese artists working today. 

Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery's usual set-up is fairly clear—a temporary exhibition of international contemporary art in the high-ceilinged galleries of its first floor, Japanese modernism from the museum's 2,400-piece Terada Collection in the smaller galleries upstairs (emerging artist showcase Project N is also there). Starting this year, however, temporary shows can occupy both floors, as this one does. But to muddy things, work by five of the 11 artists (including Nambata and Arimoto) in "Time of My Life" comes from the Terada Collection. 

Nambata's watercolor and ink abstractions combine funky Paul Klee grids with the color and curves of Wassily Kandinsky. In the larger pieces, mostly from the 1960s, black lines squiggle and zag across backgrounds of blue circles and pink spritzes, delineating bulbous buildings with lopsided windows and connecting lumpy humanoids into elaborate, dysfunctional mobiles. The later paintings are smaller, darker and blurrier, with ink outlines bleeding under washes of grayed colors. 

Fumio Nambata, Self-struggling Days, 1961, watercolor and ink on paper, 
Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery collection

Hiroshi Sugito, Yoshitomo Nara, Kyoko Murase and Makiko Kudo also employ various naïve styles. 

Sugito's installation of paintings and sculpture is perhaps the show's highlight. There's a landscape on an oval chunk of wood and a crude white Batman logo that floats off the wall, exposing its purple supports. Simple, imperfect parabolas drift across several paintings that range in size from paperback petit to Cinemascope wide. 

Nara and designer group graf also manipulate scale in their installation of three white wooden houses, S, M, L (2003). In one, the chairs are child-playhouse small. In another the sofa and TV (featuring a slide show) are slightly too big. The third—holding Nara's drawings of bad kiddies—is just right. 

Unlike Nara's children, those in Murase's watery paintings seem to sleep. Drifting kelp forests wrap them in broad pink and blue strokes. 

In Kudo's ill-drawn oils, doe-eyed youngsters inhabit colorful narrative collages of flowers and animals. 

Some prefer adults. In Arimoto's predella-sized paintings, lone figures in Renaissance garb do simple tasks, e.g. drawing aside a red curtain or skipping rope on an open plain. 

Tomoyuki Hotai's wood and bronze figurative sculptures look like studies for statuary on a modern Gothic cathedral. Missing limbs lend a classical air. 

Katsura Funakoshi is also known for carved wooden figures. Most of his pieces here, however, are large monochrome lithographs and etchings of the same kind of statue-like, forward-facing folks (there's one sculpture). 

Kyoko Murase, Grape, 2002, oil on cotton,
private collection 

The work of the remaining three artists—'70s hippie prints by Yoko Yamamoto (e.g. bearded guys among giant asparagus); graphic paintings of landscape details by Torawao Nakagawa; and kimochi ga warui (makes me feel sick) spit ice cubes and pubic hair beadwork by Yuki Okumura (the youngest artist in the show, b. 1978) —seem only tenuously related to the theme. 

There is some good work here. But the exhibition seems less about curatorial concept (though there's naïve, romantic and sentimental aplenty) than trying too hard to update the relevance of the Terada Collection via association with hip younger artists.

This exhibition was held Mar-May 2004 at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in Hatsudai, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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