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My father descends from a major line of Shinto priests. My great-grandfather, who was a large landowner in Shikoku, spent his entire fortune on his passion for Japanese Sumo wrestling. I feel I take after him in my enthusiasm and taste for a bohemian way of life, as well as resembling my father in my detachment and unsociability.
After his family's financial ruin my grandfather became a carpenter. My father began his life as a poor peasant and became politically active at a very young age - in fact he was one of the five founders of socialism in Japan. Imprisoned forty times for political reasons, this orator, spokesman for his party, and member of the parliament for eighteen years, was fascinated by plants. He was a poet who was unable to express himself. He called me Kozo, "the third undertaking," when he was elected as a parliamentary representative: the third stage in his political career.
My mother comes from a traditional upper caste family that was more intellectual than warrior. During the Meiji era, which brought about the suppression of the caste system, this family produced a great number of priests, scientists, and successful businessmen. My mother grew up in a very modest but cultivated environment, where the tradition of lettered samurais was upheld.
I began to paint when I was very young, and my parents never objected to it. On the contrary, they rather encouraged it. I began to exhibit my work at the age of seventeen, and at that time, inspired by the Expressionists, I painted in oils. While I was Tasaki's student, I admired Saeki's work. He had spent some time in France and introduced me to the fragrance of Montparnasse.
At age eighteen I attended art history classes at Keio University while continuing to paint. I was free to choose my own way of life and was determined to serve and communicate, probably having been influenced by my father's image. I did not like the atmosphere of the artistic life in Tokyo. As a painter and student, I felt that European art history showed a certain evolution, and I wanted to know the reasons underlying this gradual process. I had to understand how to paint and how to envision paintings. This seemed impossible for me in Japan. The Meiji Era broke with our aesthetic traditions while Western art manifested certain continuity. Moreover, at that time all contemporary art came from Europe.
My trip to Paris in 1960 was unconsciously motivated by a search for identity. When my father asked me why I wanted to go to Europe, I replied, "Since I have never been there, I cannot tell you. Just give me one year!" I came to Paris without knowing anything or anybody. By an extraordinary chance my landlady's husband had been one of Rodin's students, and he suggested that I go to the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.
At Aujame's studio, where I stayed for two months, everyone painted in the same way: Aujame's way. As I have always refused any master's influence, I encountered the same difficulties there as I had at Tasaki's studio in Tokyo. Thus, I entered the neighboring studio of Jacques Busse where the atmosphere was warmer and more liberal. Looking at my first painting, which was a still life, Busse told me, "That's not a painting." I was very surprised but also quite happy because he had not said it was bad. Then he explained why: "You have no structure, you don't make any element stand out from the others, you have no center." He added, "It's impossible; this form, this branch is not possible." To use the word impossible he must have been right. Besides, in Japan I had been searching to find this logic. And for over two years, I searched for logic in painting aimed at freeing the model and the object, the creation of light, and construction element by element.
I was selected to exhibit my work at the Salon de Mai. This was fantastic! But at the hanging of the show, I realized that my painting was completely inspired by Busse's. I was very annoyed and so was he. It was a shocking and even painful experience. I had to create my own language, but how, since everything I knew I learnt it from Busse? After six months of extreme discouragement, I was about to go back to Japan when César came to my home and persuaded me not to go. "After three years in Paris you are silly to go back. If you feel lonely, come work in my studio." So I went to Rue Lhomond where for over three months, I painted from morning to night, relentlessly working on the canvas in order to rid myself of this influence. Then one day César told me "I was getting somewhere." That's when I moved to my own studio, where I locked myself in and worked ten hours a day. I painted still lives without giving a thought to painting as a process and with absolutely no concern for style. I must have completed six or seven paintings that year and my only aim was to learn how to observe. This period represented my own search for identity. At that time, while I was experimenting with dark shades, friends like Monory and Fromanger were moving toward Pop Art and narrative representation and others toward Op Art. I could only paint for my own benefit what I was seeing and feeling.
Gradually my expression asserted itself by detaching itself from reality, almost in spite of my rejection of artificiality. Light began to appear in my canvases. Subjects served only as excuses for creating space through lines and planes; everything remained to be created.
This explains why I went back to a non-representational and gestural painting, which endeavored to express light in space and movement through the development of line. My paintings were very heavy and busy. Tabuchi was the one who one day, as we were sitting in Café le Dome, convinced me to simplify my style. Many Japanese painters put ten paintings in one instead of devoting a canvas to one thing. Thus I abandoned my oil painting and began to use watercolors, which enabled me to work in a more precise and more direct way without second thoughts. The form is therefore freer.
Five years after I had left the Grand Chaumière studio, I wanted to show my larger pieces. Dorny took me to the Haut-Pavé gallery, where I met Father Vallée who immediately decided to exhibit my work.This was a decisive encounter for me. It was the first time that I had met someone who was not an artist who related the work with its author. It happened at a time when I was undergoing a personal crisis and when France was also experiencing a crisis (1968). I was thinking of going back to my country like many of my foreign friends who were artists. However, I stayed and devoted myself to the Haute-Pavé gallery activities, thus leaving the studio where I had confined myself. Shortly after this first exhibition in Paris, I started serigraphy.
Through the exactness of its forms, the preciseness of its effects, and the density of its colors, serigraphy taught me to be more concise. I wanted to achieve a more rational and more conscious painting, made up of resolute shapes. Serigraphy enabled me to do away with strokes, to smooth out the surface and to conceal the technique, thus leaving only the effect. Through serigraphy I discovered a young public that I had not known before. It was easy for me to drop off my serigraphs in galleries and allow my works to leave the studio. This had been impossible with my paintings. It was a privileged moment for me at this time. It was a privileged moment when my painting began to match my temperament, when I accepted my taste for airiness, beauty, and even prettiness.
At this time, after ten years of preparation and having searched for my roots, I finally began to feel that I was finding my own way. But I soon realized that my rather geometric painting was tame, static, and too esthetic. It was clean but not expressive. I wanted it to be more sensual, warmer, and more human. Without my being conscious of it, my forms began to echo natural ones, as in the swing series. Here the spaces between curved and independent shapes, resembling petals, become forms in themselves.
Like many non-figurative artists, I longed for nature - its beauty and presence. But I did not know how to express it in a modern way. One summer in Lot, I looked at a cluster of nettles as if they were expressive, independent forms, and I realized that I could use them for their poetic effect - divorced of all realism. I had the feeling that I could achieve a frameless painting through the use of a repetitive theme. The interplay of these simple sharp forms, which I reinvented, was in a way a return to the Orient.
I then began painting large canvases, which led me to mural painting. This need to deal with the monumental, which quickly found expression in my work, just as the distribution of my serigraphs has done, gradually lent a social meaning to it. I believe that the isolation of the painter and his position as an outsider stem from a misunderstanding which robs life of some of its vitality.
My painting is representational, but I refuse to be anecdotal. I paint a leaf or a flower, and I reinvent them in order to communicate the poetic effect of a form in its context and light in space. In everyday life this research takes the form of an unexpected, yet desired and hoped for, encounter. A piece of paper in a brook or wisteria may have the same value.
I always have the feeling that, like in our tradition, the whole world lies in a single flower or in a single petal. When Tensing and Hilary reached the top of Mount Everest, Hilary exclaimed, "I have conquered the mountain;" Tensing took some pebbles and erected a little tower at the bottom of which he placed some food as homage to the mountain, and he prayed. I feel very close to Tensing. I try to observe things in this way and to communicate this vision in my work.
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