In October 1968, Nobuo Sekine dug a hole into the ground, compacted the extracted dirt into a cylinder of exactly the same size as the hole and called the work Phase — Mother Earth. This is typically regarded as the founding moment of Mono-ha, one of Japan’s most influential post-World War II art movements.
Four decades later, young curator Kaneshima Takahiro has assembled a two-part exhibition which shows that the Mono-ha movement is still very much alive in Japanese contemporary art. The first installment of this exhibition, titled Contemporary Airy Craft, is currently showing at Taipei’s Project Fulfill Art Space.
Video installation pieces, plastic toy figures and cut-up books are among the works on display. At first glance, they don’t seem to share the slightest affinity with works created by the progenitors of Mono-ha, which literally means “the school of things.”
Mono-ha artists in the 1960s and 1970s took natural materials such as earth, stones, and wood and juxtaposed them with man-made objects like glass and paper. Their aim was not to create but to rearrange things into art works with the emphasis on the interdependent relationships between different objects, as well as between objects and the spaces around them.
A well-known example of Mono-ha art is Susumu Koshimizu’s Paper (1969), which consists of a large stone placed inside a giant envelope made of Japanese paper. Another is Wall (1971) by the late Koji Enokura, which shows a concrete wall built between two trees.
In the exhibit now on display at Project Fulfill Art Space, an old copy of Yukio Mishima’s classic novel The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea hangs on a wall. The book is open in the middle with fragments from different pages glued to its surface in patterns that resemble tree rings. Across the room, two toy figurines are covered with plastic hair of various colors collected from other toys, which makes the pair look like ornate monsters.
To Kaneshima, the genealogical link between the different generations of artists can be found in their shared interest in the placement and juxtaposition of materials, textures and concepts.
In Kaneuji Teppei’s Sea and Pus series, for example, the artist cuts out pictures of cosmetics from fashion magazines and pastes them onto photographs of completely unrelated subjects such as bears or abandoned Buddhist statues. Unlike the first-generation of Mono-ha artists, who opted for natural materials, Kaneuji uses everyday objects that appear to lack any significance in and of themselves and arranges them in a seemingly random patterns. This interest in the meaningless and the arbitrary can be seen as a reflection of the times we live in.
“The artists in the 1970s had very different ideas about things than we do. We are living in a world filled with commodities, objects and information. We have too much and no longer know what is important and what is not,” the 33-year-old curator said.
SHIMURABROS, a sister-brother team, take images from a video show they made for a Japanese fashion brand last year and incorporate them into the video installation series Eicon. Displaying male models jumping, falling or spinning in extreme slow motion, the images are played in loop on monitors embellished with lacquer frames made by a Japanese master craftsman.
“The monitor [represents] technology, the lacquer-ware craftsmanship, and the images fashion,” said Kaneshima. “The three things have nothing to do with each other and with art, but put together, they become an item of contemporary art.”
Craftsmanship is a key concept in this exhibition. Whereas the first generation of Mono-ha artists assigned a certain value (natural or man-made) to the objects they used to create their art, the younger artists make no such distinction. For the younger artists, the value of their work lies in the fact that it is exquisitely crafted, hence the Chinese title of the exhibition: shougan
(手感), which translates as “hand-felt.”
“I find the idea of craftsmanship is an interesting part of Japanese contemporary art. Japanese artists who use their hands to create tend to make light, airy works,” Kaneshima said.
In other words, they make art that is fun to look at and which dwells on the whimsical and the personal rather than weightier subject matter.
For Iida, reading is sculpturing. When he reads a book, he cuts out lines and words from each page. Once he’s completed reading the book, the book has been transformed into a finished sculpture. The pieces titled Alice in Wonderland and Book Compilation are works in progess, showing the artist’s mental impressions on the fantasy novel and an encyclopedia he has been reading.
As for the curatorial concepts behind the show, Kaneshima gladly acknowledged that part of his ideas come from outside a Japanese context.
“We don’t have the term shougan in Japan. When I came to Taiwan, I found out that is how Taiwanese describe Japanese crafts. So I adopted the idea for the exhibition. It is interesting to see how we [Japanese] are being looked at by others [Taiwanese],” the curator said.
For the second part of the exhibition, Kaneshima will bring the aforementioned “we” and “others” together by showing the works of two Japanese and two Taiwanese artists, all of whom create work that is informed by the Mono-ha movement. The show will take place in March at Project Fulfill Art Space.
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