Contemporary Women Artists from Japan

Dr Kathleen Olive

One of the things you notice as a traveller in Japan is how a deep love and appreciation for the country’s own traditions of art, architecture and culture are carefully balanced with the relentless pace of modernity and an international aesthetic.

In this article, we take a look at a number of contemporary women artists whose work exemplifies these tensions, rising out of the great national tradition of arts and crafts but pushing beyond its norms in fascinating ways.

Yayoi Kusama

Kusama is probably the first Japanese artist that most of us think of today. Born in the shadow of Matusumoto Castle, a young Kusama trained in traditional Japanese painting. Nihonga, as this style is known, was a favoured way for twentieth-century artists to bring together traditional techniques and styles – such as painting in inks, or using the bright colours and gold of the Rinpa School – with a Western treatment of perspective and light.

But Nihonga was not Kusama’s own style. She was much more interested in the art of her time, and in the middle of the twentieth century the epicentre of that world was New York City. Moving to the Big Apple in 1958, Yayoi Kusama became one of the most important players in New York’s developing performance and installation art scenes.

Kusama is still associated with two types of work that she began making at this time. One of these was her infinity nets, in which single strokes are repeated over and over, testing the artist’s endurance and the viewer’s powers of perception. Like the exercises of Zen Buddhist monks, the infinity nets are sometimes even exhibited like the unfurling handscrolls of the great Japanese tradition.

The most distinctive element of Kusama’s work, also developed in the 50s and 60s, remains her use of polka dots, which she began by applying to the naked bodies of volunteers, friends or to herself. They cover giant pumpkin sculptures, mirrors and even the toilet in her Tokyo museum, and they seem to brim with vitality and joy, but they have a more complex personal association. A difficult childhood led the young Kusama to experience hallucinations. Flowers would speak to her, or people and objects would be covered in polka dots. Despite the frightening nature of these apparitions, Kusama saw their potential and embraces them in her work.

Returning to Japan in the 1970s, Kusama continued her avant-garde work and relished the challenges it posed to conservative norms. Worsening health led her to voluntarily check into a mental hospital in 1977, and she still lives there at the age of 93. Her studio is not far, however, and she continues to make her ‘infinity rooms’ of mirrors and polka dots. Kusama has inaugurated a museum in Tokyo entirely dedicated to her work and made another significant bequest to Matsumoto City Museum of Art. She is one of the most commercially successful artists worldwide.

Chiharu Shiota

This thoughtful artist, who makes delicate works out of thread, paper and found objects, is less known than Yayoi Kusama and her polka dot pumpkins, but she is one of the most highly-regarded contemporary Japanese artists and in 2015 was selected to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale.

Like Kusama, Shiota studied art in Kyoto, still considered the nation’s cultural capital. She also undertook a number of student exchanges during her university degree, including time in Berlin and Canberra, and was thereby introduced to the international contemporary art world. Like Kusama, Chiharu Shiota also began her artistic career with an interest in performance art, using her body as a canvas for painting with mud and studying in Berlin with Marina Abramović.

Shiota’s experiences as a student overseas, coupled with her decision to move permanently to Berlin at the turn of the millennium, gave her an enduring interest in place, psychology and patterns of human movement. Gathering objects from friends and family, such as discarded shoes, or weaving large installations from thread, she began to explore how who we are is connected to where we find ourselves.

She began to collect discarded objects on a larger scale – windows from East Berlin construction sites, thousands of keys to houses that no longer exist, discarded clothes that still reveal something of their owner – and wove them together in a literal sense. Frequently using red thread, Shiota’s works symbolically connect objects and viewer, but their proliferating webs can also obscure; the rotting timbers of an abandoned boat or delicate nets of cotton suggest impermanence, but the hours required to assemble them, and the strength of the spider-like webs, indicate that humans are as resilient as they are vulnerable.

Chiharu Shiota’s large-scale installations have a quiet power, their dramatic visual impact complemented by their thoughtful construction and the message they convey.

Yoko Ono

Throughout history, it’s often been the case that women artists’ biographies are of more interest than their work. This is perhaps more true of Yoko Ono than of any other woman artist except for Artemisia Gentileschi and yet, like Yayoi Kusama, Ono has played a significant role in the international contemporary art world since the 1950s.

Born into a privileged family, Ono grew up between California, where her father worked, Tokyo, New York City and Hanoi, and witnessed the fire-bombing of Tokyo during World War II.  After the war, Yoko’s family moved to Scarsdale, New York. Enrolling at Sarah Lawrence College, she began to study poetry and music composition, and became interested in experimental music after she was introduced to the work of John Cage. . Music and performance became a regular part of the ‘happenings’ she staged in New York City in the late 1950s, at the same time as Yayoi Kusama moved there.

Ono’s conceptual artworks are now often associated with her relationship with John Lennon, such as the 1969 Bed-In that they staged in their honeymoon suite as an anti-war protest. But Ono’s early works were often characterised by an ‘instructional’ nature, inviting viewers and participants to carry out acts that created or destroyed the artwork, such as walking across a canvas or cutting away pieces of her clothing. Ono encouraged her viewers to consider the power of their actions, from a political significance to an impact on the environment, women’s rights or social justice.

An enduring aspect of Yoko Ono’s work has been a focus on pacificism. From the Plastic Ono Band’s song “Give Peace A Chance” to her recent Add Color Painting, which included an abandoned refugee boat, it isn’t surprising that a post-atomic, post-war Japanese artist should foreground pacificism. Ono reflects on peace in ways that are tied to other aspects of Japanese identity, too. Her Wish Tree is an ongoing sculpture project, for example, in which visitors write their wishes and dreams on small pieces of paper that are tied to living trees, just as in a Shinto shrine.

Rei Naito

This elusive artist was born in Hiroshima in 1961, and has become influential in the international art world thanks to her collaborations with architects such as Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA. Reluctant to give interviews or to be filmed – as in the recent documentary, A Room of Her Own: Rei Naito and Light – Naito often investigates deeply philosophical questions. A preoccupation with life and death and with nature’s patterns betray her interest in traditional Japanese spirituality.

Like Ono, Naito’s works often seem connected to Shinto, an animistic set of beliefs in which natural elements, animals and people have a powerful force that can be active and passive, positive and negative, and which we strive to keep in balance. Naito embodies such spirits in the natural materials she works with, such as the myriad small human figurines that populate her installation Human (2011). In a thoughtful work for a Carmelite monastery in Frankfurt, Being Called (1997), she made a pillow for each of the 304 dead monks portrayed in a Renaissance fresco, allowing her, she wrote, “to exist in harmony with the passage of time.”

An interest in architecture is often part of Naito’s art, and she has repeatedly collaborated with Tokyo’s SANAA. On the island of Teshima in the Seto Inland Sea, she created Matrix (2010), a powerful work that is placed inside architect Ryue Nishizawa’s  concrete ‘teardrop.’ The work harnesses water through hidden channels, so that small droplets seem to spontaneously bubble from the floor as if from a natural spring, or gather on the curved roof of the structure, pooling and moving across the concrete before disappearing again. Actually propelled by the wind, the droplets respond to the movements of nature, like the delicate strings that drift lightly in the building’s opening to the sky.

Matrix provokes a deep response, aided by the fact that speaking is not permitted inside Nishizawa’s building due to the loud echoing of its curved concrete walls. Visitors to this installation are invited to walk quietly inside, sit and reflect, watching the movements of the water droplets or string. A quiet, womb-like space, it makes a space for contemplation, to admire the coming together of traditional Japanese aesthetics and philosophies with contemporary materials and design – the hallmarks of much of the great art produced by Japanese artists today.

DR KATHLEEN OLIVE

Kathleen Olive is a well-known cultural tour leader and has led groups to Italy, France, Spain, the USA and Japan for over fifteen years. She regularly offers popular lectures on art, history and culture, including for the Australian Decorative and Fine Arts Society (ADFAS). READ MORE

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