COMPOSITION, IMPROMPTU, CONCRETE

An art exhibition titled, "Intermedia: Between Art and Sculpture," was held at the Aldrich Museum of Modern Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut on January 14 to May 6, 1984, featuring nearly 40 artists including Christo, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella. The exhibition included space for new acquisitions, in which eight emerging artists were introduced. Shoko Kingetsu was represented by her 1982 "Modern Dancer" piece, a mixed-media work of oil and collage resulting in a "passionate abstract," characterized by dynamic composition and overflowing expression.

Kingetsu journeyed to the United States in 1973, and studied the art of collage under Leo Manso, a highly respected painter and collagist at the Art Students League of New York. Around that same time, she encountered the world of modern dance. Struck by the intensity of motion and feverish energy, Kingetsu took pencil in hand.

Her hand flew to capture the tension in the studio, the almost despairing quest for perfection, and the moments of vulnerable uncertainty. These sketches became the genesis of many of her collage paintings of this era. One quintessential example of her work during this time is a four-meter wide painting called "Dancing"(1978). The bodies of the soaring dancers are rendered in black paper collage, and the air surrounding them is depicted in white, brown, and black, with a thematic closeness to her "Crazy Man of Manhattan" series.

This publication of Kingetsu's work has three separate segments: "Dancing," 1977-1981; "Spirituality," 1980-2004; and "Soil" 2001-2002. I'd like to call these segments "composition," "impromptu," and "concrete," respectively. The "Dancing" series emerged from a multitude of sketches, a process similar to a composer creating music. Thus, as often found in this composition stage, the "Dancing" series is driven by ideals and consciousness.

Kingetsu's "Spirituality" series take on an entirely different timber - the pieces in this series spontaneously and freely depict the underlying emotion, calling to mind a piano impromptu, known for its freeness in form. This freedom is seen in her "Winds of Green"(1990) with its transparent wind and green of the early summer, and in "Flying, Faster, Free!"(1996), where one takes wing through a vibrant blue sky. The illuminating night forest, home to the nymphs ("Moon night Forest", 2004) provoked the creation of "Gods together at Night," 1991, and a divine revelation is given on the riverside in "River of the Gods," 1999.

Kingetsu returned to Japan in 1985 and exhibited primarily in Osaka, Kobe and Kyoto. Since her return to Japan, her style became more spiritual, transforming from "composition" to "impromptu." At the beginning of 21st century, she entered the phase of "concrete," inclining towards abstract expressions by creating a montage of raw materials.

"Concrete" is the assemblage of natural and industrial sounds where the imaginary is reinforced by the actual. Her soil series exemplify this theme, as Kingetsu used actual soil on canvas. Her representation of Earth is diverse, ranging from terraced paddy fields to autumn fields and groundwater. Each is tied together by the physical existence of soil, but differentiated by location and character. The mixture of soil in acrylic (and occasionally wood and cloth) brings through a raw element to her work. With this, the freedom in her work resembles an unrestrictive and continuous space, recalling sand or mud. In the back of all this is her firm belief that nature and people are not separate entities, that there is no discontinuity. She has revived the rights of earth and sand, and has revolutionized the concept of art.

"Composition" → "Impromptu" → "Concrete" - the development of Kingetsu's artistic style mirrors the evolution of modern art.

While the winds of time rustle and change the leaves of the yielding tree and the trends of contemporary art, the deep - rooted trunk of Kingetsu’s work remains unmovable. This is her uncompromising deference towards nature. Nature itself is the grand composer, and people are bound by its unseen parameters; one cannot go beyond this encompassing arrangement. The Hanshin-Awaji Great Earthquake in 1995 only helped to deepen her thought.

Kimura Shigenobu
Director Curator
Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art

Objects as "Landscapes"    Shigenobu Kimura

Box Art by Shoko Kingetsu is a series of work where small rectangular boxes contain various objects.

First of all, object is a word comparable to subject, and in an everyday concept it means a simple thing while philosophically it means a substance. It is after Cubism that such concept of object become salient in the history of art.

Michel Ragon said that Renaissance art was linked, above all, to aesthetics centering on human beings. Even divine things were taken up in order to exalt the beauty of the human body. During the eighteenth century, history, genre and still life replaced this glorious "individual" and in the nineteenth century "human being" has almost vanished because of landscape. In the twentieth century, with the emergence of Cubism we have witnessed the victory of object, the victory of pure object.

The subject took priority in art before Cubism. Therefore, we were able to ask such a work, "What does this work express?" That is, what was important was not "thing" but "matter" But in a work with preference for object over subject, even a figure of man is interpreted as a "thing". Furthermore with the expansion of matiere, materialism becomes conspicuous.

The expression of "matter" is Visual while the creation of "thing" is tactile. Tactility perceives "thing" itself while visual sensation perceives the surface of "thing". While tactility is a realistic sensation linked to material, visual sensation is linked to form through semblance. It is only natural that Kingetsu, who regards art not as an object of detached observation but as a raw expression, is inclined to tactility rather than vision, object rather than subject.

Even Kingetsu's paintings are object-like. It is because the materials she uses are not intermediary but objective to her intention. For instance, her collage painting does not "express" a specific space but "determine" it and what is important is not the method of expression but the method of existence itself. Therefore, the reality of Kingetsu's works is not the reality of object, which exists outside of the artist, but the work itself exists as a "thing" and, in that sense, it is an object.

"The Box Art" series show such objects perfectly. Kingetsu packs various objects in various boxes. For instance, birds, butterflies and dragonflies are enclosed in the series, "Unflyable Creatures (1992-1995)".

In these works the artist incorporates her anxiety about the rapid destruction of nature, causing the disruption of ecosystem, which in turn is disturbing mankind, as well as her fear of human egoism. In that sense, her works are related to the words of Ragon mentioned earlier.

There is an installation called, "Have Women Gained Freedom? (1990-91)", laying a box over another and tying them with iron cords. In the boxes, baby clothes are covered with sand. The work is latent with a question whether women truly gained freedom by discarding motherhood and becoming independent as career women. For Kingetsu as a mother, conceiving a child undoubtedly meant conceiving an idea.

However, strangely Kingetsu says these works are landscapes. Of course they are not the landscapes that Ragon meant of the nineteenth century but "landscapes of Kingetsu's heart." That is, "The issues of the times we live in are involved."(The artist's words for her solo exhibition at the LADS Gallery, 2005) What shows this issue clearly is her installation, "Fifty Years after the War, (1995)". While mourning the deaths of her father and mother, (1991 and 1995), Kingetsu sealed the oppressive "time" by packing her parents' clothes into a trunk and a portmanteau which they had carried with them through the battlefields and from place to place during the fifty years after the war.

The issues that "Box Art" by Shoko Kingetsu contains are weighty and serious.

(Art Critic)