Nihonga Painting: Six Provocative Artists

The Yokohama Museum of Art welcomes contemporary voices working in a traditional form

Nihon: Japan. Ga: picture.

Kengo Nakamura, Re:, 2002, (from the "graf media gm" installation, Osaka) Courtesy of Yokohama Museum of Art. Photo by Yasunori Shitamura

The word nihonga was coined in the Meiji era, when Japan was emerging from its long period of isolation and feeling its way around in a world dominated by European aesthetics. The term was used to distinguish the unique subject matter and history of Japanese painting. And at the heart of that painting one finds kacho fugetsu—literally, “flowers, birds, wind and moon”—comprising the sublime and subtle view of nature for which much of traditional Japanese art is so revered.
In this exhibition, the Yokohama Museum of Art, following in the footsteps of a spring exhibition of young Nihonga artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, attempts to bring a new generation of Japan’s painters into the canon of art history—and at the same time alter our perceptions of what that art form can be.

Toward that end, the museum mixes paintings from previous eras with contemporary work, but the result is a somewhat ambiguous mishmash, and most of the connections are all but forgettable. Kacho fugetsu is far from a driving force for most of these newer artists; rather, what makes the exhibition compelling is their contemporary sensibilities. The historical pieces on display seem like an afterthought, included only to reinforce the Japanese-ness of the six artists.
The connection is, however, quite clear in some of the work. Mami Kosemura’s saturated video installations, Flowering Plants of the Four Seasons (2004), utilize an untraditional medium to speak directly to the history of Japanese imagery. These quivering representations of flowers and plants mix a videotaped scene over an actual painting for a mesmerizing effect that’s both contemplative and calming.

Even the dark ethereal energy of Fuyuko Matsui’s Becoming Friends with All the Children in the World (2002) presents readily “Japanese” imagery, albeit in an unusual form. Rendered in traditional pigments, a young girl bends down amid dangling wisteria as if to whisper, in what from afar appears to be a charming scene of youth. Yet the dark colors create an uncertainty, and closer inspection reveals swarming wasps mixed in with the flowers, and an eerie white baby carriage in the background.

Fuyuko Matsui, Becoming Friends with All the Children in the World, 2002 Courtesy of Yokohama Museum of Art

Yet in works like Kengo Nakamura’s Re: (2002), which repeats the email idiom across a line of brightly colored squares, the connections to tradition seem a bit thin compared to more immediate associations with modernists like On Kawara and Piet Mondrian.

Nakamura himself seems ready to poke fun at the search for connections, as he places his humorous Speech Balloons in the Hinomaru (2002) over Taikan Yokoyama’s majestic 1919 painting Sacred Mt. Fuji. Nakamura’s work, a small Japanese flag with the red sun carved up by a series of empty comic book speech balloons, appropriates the previous artist’s piece as part of an apparently flippant critique of the blending of old and new. The two are displayed as one work, and in this small gesture Nakamura creates a surprisingly poignant addition to the show. As his sun rises over Fuji-san, it’s clear the pieces need each other in order to be relevant—not only to the exhibition but to contemporary Japan itself.

Yokohama Museum of Art, until September 20. See exhibition listings (other areas) for details.

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