Page 123 - japanese and korean art Utterberg Collection Christie's March 22 2022

GHOST INK

RYAN HOLMBERG
SENIOR LECTURER, SCHOOL OF THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

Imagine a small theater. The theater is dark. The stage is black. exhibition, titled “Flower” (Hana, undated), reveals Inoue in a
Slowly, as your eyes adjust, you realize that the stage is illuminated more subdued mood, with the kanji character for “flower” shaped
after all, but with the faintest of lights. You perceive the stage floor by a quick ensemble of juicy strokes. The flowing curves, like
to be shimmering, to be moving gently, in easy ripples, in soft bends in a river, and the two wet ellipses top right indicate how the
flows. The lights grow brighter. Bolts of diaphanous white stretch ink arts, especially in their modernist phase, are equally invested in
across the stage, taught, bright with light caught in the mesh, then the properties of liquids as in those of solids.
loose, then falling, turning, as if dancing, separating and fluttering,
like caught by a breeze, feathering into threads, then dispersing, the An architecture of liquid solids is precisely what another key figure
light along with them, the stage slowly returning to darkness. in the modernization of Japanese ink arts, Toko Shinoda (b. 1913),
has extensively explored. Since first appearing on the global art
The theater is the gallery you now stand in. The show’s directors stage in the mid 1950s, Shinoda has developed a rich language of
are the Japanese artists Toshiyuki Kajioka (b. 1978) and Yasuko abstract forms, juxtaposing delicate lines and bold slabs derived
Hasumura (b. 1958). Their stage is made not of bolts and beams, mainly from calligraphic poetry on decorative washi paper dating
but of paper and board. Their choreography of ethereal flows works back to the Heian period (794-1185). As her and Inoue’s work
not with real water, light, or air, but rather black Japanese sumi demonstrates, “the art of sumi” is in fact a mixed art of ink, water,
ink, and what that liquid medium can do when combined with and paper, with abstraction stemming from any combination of
the fibers of paper, the movement of brushes, and the incisions of those elements, and/or from the brush and body that guide them.
other tools. Kajioka and Hasumura’s work marks a move within
the East Asian ink arts beyond painting and poetry, beyond Over the past decade, Yasuko Hasumura has provided this tradition
abstraction, beyond gestural performance, and into a simulated a new, more theatrical and quasi-sculptural interpretation. If
theater of ghostly traces, immaterial currents, and entities unheard most sumi artists exploit paper primarily as a substrate with
and unseen. different absorptive qualities, Hasumura reverses the hierarchy by
emphasizing the delicate materiality of Japanese washi paper with
To free ink and paper in this way took time. While the histories ink primarily serving as background foil. She begins by coating
of ink painting and calligraphy are replete with legends of a stretched canvas with a ground of acrylic medium and mineral
drunken eccentrics incorporating their bodies and hair into pigments. She paints over that base with a layer of diluted ink,
their brush strokes, resulting in ink splashed and strewn across then another once the first has dried. This produces a modulated
the paper beyond the functions of signification, East Asian ink ground with a range of atmospheric greys whose tones and forms
traditions remained fundamentally tethered to visual and verbal are determined by air temperature, water temperature, humidity
representation until the intercession of modernism in the 1950s. levels, and other factors over which the artist has only limited
Key in Japan was Genbi (Contemporary Art Discussion Group), control. That Hasumura thinks of this ink ground as something
founded in the Osaka area in 1952. With connections between like a landscape setting is suggested by the horizon line that cuts
modernist abstraction and Japan’s traditional arts as one of its across many of her canvases. Ink wash, in other words, is as much
central concerns, Genbi served as an important incubator of ideas an environment as a surface.
for key avant-garde groups like the painters of the Gutai Art
Association (f. 1954) and the calligraphers of the Bokujinkai (The Upon this environment, Hasumura layers diaphanous strips of
Ink People’s Society, f. 1952). white washi. Sometimes the strips are tapered and linear, and
affixed flat and smoothly. Sometimes they are folded in upon
Enamored with Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel, themselves, creating the illusion of irregular pockets of shallow
alongside the bold and explosive calligraphy of Zen monks, space. Sometimes segments are mashed together, forming relief
the Bokujinkai produced large-scale calligraphic works whose topographies, recalling the bas-relief works she created before
powerful gesturalism and anarchic fluidity threatened the limits of turning to ink in the late 2000s. Hasumura’s handling of space,
verbal legibility, in the name of gestalts that could be appreciated however, is essentially planar. Singly, the washi elements are gauze-
by people regardless of whether or not they could read Chinese like and see-through. Multiply layered, they are bright and opaque.
ideographs. In 1955, one of the group’s members, Yuichi Inoue Sometimes additional layers of ink are added between the sheaths
(1916-85), fully broke with writing with mad splatters created with to create translucencies that, while physically tissue-thin, beckon
oversize brushes dipped in buckets of ink. The work in the present the eye into their virtual depths. The nebular space of traditional