- Between Abstraction and Representation | The Paintings of Yasuki Masako
- Samuel C.Morse (Professor of the History of Japanese Art, Amherst College)
I first had the privilege of looking at Yasuki Masako's remarkable paintings in 2003 when I was selecting work for the exhibition Confronting Tradition that I curated for the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, Massachusetts (2004). The premise of the project was to show American audiences how contemporary artists living and working in Kyoto, Japanfs most traditional city, reconcile the weight of history with a desire to engage in more contemporary artistic practices. Yasuki's paintings achieve that goal in potent and unexpected ways.
Yasukifs landscapes set up captivating tensions between representation and abstraction. In the cityscapes of the Obliterated Ground series the viewer's eye attempts to order the marks on the canvas into some meaningful arrangement. A tall building, a street, or a row of houses begins to take shape, but final resolution of the forms remains elusive. Yasuki's goal is to give expression to the very moment when recognition fails, but when memory continues to force an attempt to fashion meaning from what one sees. The role of memory becomes all the more important in this exercise when the viewer realizes that the paintings represent Japanese cities that were destroyed by bombs during World War II. Often, she will incorporate earth from the locales into her pigments thereby making her works relics of the events. Past and present, transience and permanence are conjoined in her luminous canvases.
Yasuki likens the process of painting to speaking a language, and she is very conscious that some of the methods she has chosen are not native to Japan. She has stated gOne method I have been using is a typical and traditional Western method. To paint with tempera and oils on large canvases often teaches me that painting is not my mother tongue. It is an absolutely foreign language for me.h
Yet, Yasuki also works with a more familiar vocabulary that coexists in her works with the foreign. Like traditional East Asian paintings, many of her works do not have a fixed vantage point and simultaneously incorporate different perspectival systems. She prepares her canvases on both the back as well as the front, a practice that is reminiscent of the way a traditional Japanese painter prepares silk supports for Buddhist images. At times she mixes traditional Japanese pigments which she then combines with Western ones in her paintings. She uses gold and silver leaf and also incorporates some of the distinctive characteristics of Japanese formats into her works.
The results speak a powerful new language. The works in the Deep Forest and Nature series create the illusion that the viewer is surrounded by vegetation so thick that it becomes impossible to make out many individual details. There is no direct source of light, rather it diffuses through a canopy of leaves transforming into myriad colors. The trees in her Pine Trees series are actually negative space and their lyrical arrangement across broad expanses is contradicted by their actual immateriality. In sum, Yasuki's masterful paintings provide her viewers with a new way of seeing the world while at the same time forcing them to consider the very nature of perception.