Shinro Ohtake Zen-Kei
One of Japan’s most prolific artists takes over the MOT

Dub-Hei and New Channel, 1999 Courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. Photo by Masaki Nakano

Painted Matter I (Atlanta), 1997 Photo by Masaki Nakano

As he gazed at a retrospective of his works near the end of his life, the much-lauded American painter Philip Guston famously said, “It’s not so much a painting show, it’s like a life, you know, like a life lived.” The same can certainly be said of this latest exhibition celebrating Shinro Ohtake, one of Japan’s best-known contemporary artists.

Although perhaps it’s more fitting to say that “Zen-Kei” (Japanese for “full scope”) represents half a life lived—Ohtake, 51, is now in the middle of his career and entering what may be his prime. The exhibition chronicles the many stages of the artist’s developments in excruciating detail: from his first drawings in elementary school to travels abroad in London and beyond, as well as a recent two-story-tall textile painting. The sheer number of works on display is staggering. There are more than 2,000 individual pieces covering all three floors of the museum’s temporary exhibition space, and it becomes obvious immediately in the opening rooms that Ohtake is nothing if not prolific.

The first pieces we encounter inside the galleries are a series of glass boxes that hold Ohtake’s journals. These overflowing books are literally bursting apart with magazine clippings, playing cards, hair, paint, guitars and fish parts, in addition to several less identifiable substances. The books are obsessive objects of artistic devotion that brim with ideas and function like living records of Ohtake’s mind.

We are then led on a rather too lengthy tour of drawings and paintings from throughout Ohtake’s elementary, high school and college days. It isn’t until we arrive in the ’80s that we begin to see his work mature into something directed and meaningful, but all along the way the gallery walls are crowded with a wallpaper-like smattering of images.

In later rooms it is Ohtake’s painting that is most captivating. Works like the Retina series from the early ’90s and recent landscape works display an abstract and sublime imagery that’s alive with poignantly expressive painterly energy.

Other works of note include the chaotic one-man-band construction Dub-Hei and New Channel (1999), which is an incarnation of Ohtake’s longstanding devotion to music and noise. There is also the fantastic series of sculptures called “Shipyard” that are cut and manipulated out of the hulls of boats. As with Bow with Hole (1990), these works are calculated Gordon Matta-Clark-like deconstructions of small vessels that cover the floor of the basement gallery like a sanitized ocean graveyard.

Shipyard Works: Bow With Hole, 1990 Courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art, Photo by Shigeo

“Zen-Kei,” though, is an exhibition that is all forest and very few trees—it’s difficult to find individual pieces that truly stand out. What the exhibition does show, in a pause-less rush of visual stimuli, is just how broad Ohtake’s scope has been throughout his career. There are so many less-traveled roads explored in his work that we cannot help but feel drawn in. We see clearly in the energy and devotion buzzing through the galleries that Ohtake’s life in music, drawing, sculpture and painting is most definitely a life being lived.

Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, until Dec 24. See exhibition listings (Kayabacho/Kiba) for details.

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