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Eastern Tradition, Western Aesthetics
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16503 |
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THE ARTS
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11 / 1989 |
1,672 Words |
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Robert Kehlmann
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In any art of a culture there lies an image of that society's beliefs, conflicts, passions, and obsessions. The artistic expression of an era, even if marked by quirky eccentricities, invariably calls attention to a culture's major concerns. Artists have an uncanny way of boldly, and often disturbingly, touching a society's most sensitive nerve endings. The works in the touring exhibition Against Nature: Japanese Art in the Eighties, which features emerging Japanese artists born after World War II, do precisely this. They focus upon Japan's ambivalence toward the influence of Western culture, which has had a powerful impact since the end of the war nearly half a century ago.
The exhibition has many examples of the fine craftsmanship, meticulous design, and versatility in handling a wide range of materials that we in the West have come to associate with the arts of Japan. Yet, while some works do make use of traditional Japanese crafts such as weaving, calligraphy, and wood carving, the individual pieces on the whole express self-conscious irreverence toward their own native culture. Few hints of the inner directed simplicity and austerity of Zen Buddhist and Shinto art are to be found here, in either the subject matter or the highly decorative, colorful surface textures.
Against Nature focuses on urban Japanese artists who have chosen to concentrate on the Westernization of Japan, with its attendant popular culture and technology. (There is no pretense on the part of its curators that the exhibit is in any way a comprehensive survey of contemporary Japanese art.) Some have embraced the invader and use Western imagery, computer technology, and video screens. Others have carefully distanced themselves, exploring their subject through subtle associations and allusions.
Underlying Solitude
The artists who have created the show's most successful pieces do not seem unduly overwhelmed by the Westernization of Japan. Shoko Maemoto's fanciful elaborations of Western female dress convey an underlying solitude and inner-directedness that lends meaning to their colorful surface textures. One senses that the artist is using the device of Western attire to express deep personal emotions. Her identity and her cultural roots appear intact. Western women's clothing simply offers her a way to comment on both the interrelationship and the separateness of the East and the West. The flaming, bleeding dress in Silent Explosion perhaps comments on a spiritual malaise or even self-destructiveness that the Japanese may have acquired from contact with the West.
Other artists in the exhibition have Westernized their work to such a degree that they seem almost to have lost touch with their own cultural identity. A desire--perhaps compulsion would be a more appropriate word--to explore Western art and culture has carried them into a realm where the loss of their own personal and cultural uniqueness has become the subject of their work. They have so given themselves over to imitating the techniques, imagery, and aesthetics of Western art that their work itself documents the extent to which Western culture has made inroads in Japan. Self-consciously, and with a fair amount of humor, the works in the exhibition suggest that the Americanization of Japan goes far beyond such superficial manifestations as clothing, architecture, McDonald's, neon lights, and the use of English
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