- When Whispering Landscapes Become Songs on Canvas
- Nagahiro Kinoshita (History of Thoughts and Modern Art)
Throughout the modern age, the rapid progress of technology and the enormous increase of knowledge have been remarkable. We, the children of the technological era, are apt to think of ourselves as situated at the pinnacle of this world, and have become accustomed to understanding its history and current state through access to masses of information standardized by technology.
As a consequence, are we in danger of undervaluing the precious thoughts and feelings of our ancestors? And are accidents such as the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake and resulting tsunami typical examples of breakdowns in the field of technology? Are we getting ahead of ourselves in our drive for progress because of a belief in the power of the human intellect to control technology?
Technology and art, which both have their origin in the Greek word techne and its classical Latin translation ars, are arguably still today entwined in the existence of contemporary art. Masako Yasuki was sensitive to such problems as an artist long before the incident at Fukushima. While painting, in awe of the possibilities of the technology and art, she considers their relationship and fate, and seeks to open away to emancipate herself and us from the bondage of modernism.
Yasukifs work is a testament to her struggle to defeat these problems, and her success in doing so.
Yasukifs work begins with the discovery of elandscapef through eyes and body. It is the living landscape that strikes her, but it is nothing like elandscapef in the sense used in modern painting. It is a sum greater than its parts, as if it were existence itself. Yasuki calls this experience a visit to ethe inverse perspective of the landscape. She doesn't only observe the shape of landscape, but also wants to feel it, and to be captured by a kind of heat of the earth.
Yasuki uses three methods to paint such landscapes. The first is to look downward from an elevated vantage point. This is not a birdfs eye view, but akin to shin-en, an ancient East Asian method of painting that looks deep, but not with depth perspective, from a high point of view. The second is frottage, a means in which she rubs the surface of the earth, and which is reminiscent of ko-en | looking up high while crawling on the earthfs surface. This is also a method of old East Asian art used for landscapes. The third is hei-en, another ancient East Asian method which entails looking at landscape from the horizon, and which Yasuki realises in her Pine-Trees Landscape works.
The method Yasuki choses is influenced by the distance from the modern stage she wants to assume in order to access the ancient thoughts and feelings that modernism has abandoned. Regarding painting materials, she selects from, among others, the tempera of medieval European paintings, natural pigments of old oriental paintings, kin-paku (gold leaf) and gin-paku (silver leaf). By becoming accustomed with these inconvenient and old-fashioned materials, she intends to open a path of communication with the ancient arts.
From a modernist point of view, all things are liable to understanding by man. Landscape, however, exists over and beyond such regard. The elandscapef that Yasuki wants to realise on canvas is, as it were, a whispering or rustling landscape that is brewed from light and shadow by the heat of the earth. It is this whispering or rustling that she tries to put into song with brush on canvas.
Letfs stand in front of Masako Yasukifs paintings and listen to the faint song that her paintbrushes make, for the moment of our meeting with her paintings will truly be born when we tune into the delicate lines of her songs. Then and there is the pleasure of looking at her works.