Tadahito Mochinaga Exhibition at the National Film Center (Tokyo)

Tadahito Mochinaga: Puppet Animation Filmmaker

人形アニメーション作家 持永もちなが只仁

National Film Center, Tokyo

13 May – 10 September, 2017

http://www.momat.go.jp/english/fc/exhibition/mochinaga/

 

The National Film Center in Tokyo has been closed for renovations but will be reopening in May.  As part of their celebrations of thecentenary of Japanese animation the museum will feature an exhibition celebrating the career of legendary puppet animation pioneer Tadahito Mochinaga.  The exhibition will start with his contributions to early pre-war anime in Japan, such as assisting Mitsuyo Seo in the production of Ari-chan (1941).  Among his many innovations during the production of this film, he constructed the first multiplane animation table in Japan. 

In 1945, Mochinaga moved to China where he set up an animation studio and mentored young artists who would go on to become the top animators in the country.  Upon his return to Japan in 1953, he began producing educational puppet animation shorts.  One of these films, Little Black Sambo (1956) came to the attention of the American film producers Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Saul Bass and led to Mochinaga’s company doing the stop motion for some of America’s best loved television holiday classics such as Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) and The Little Drummer Boy (1968). 

Mochinaga was a mentor to Japan’s puppet animation masters Kihachirō Kawamoto and Tadanari Okamoto, who in turn would inspire a future generations of stop motion animation in Japan.

The exhibition will feature original puppets, drawings, and notes.  There are also film screenings to be held July 22-23, 2017.  More information TBA at a later date.

To learn more about Mochinaga, read:

MOM Productions and the Making of Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer

Rankin/Bass Christmas Specials: Made in Japan

The Little Drummer Boy

Little Black Sambo

Little Black Sambo and the Twins

2017 Cathy Munroe Hotes

Kawamoto-Norstein @ Forum des Images, Day 3

Kawamoto-Norstein @ Forum des Images, Day 3

Sunday, March 25, 2012

On this day I rose early and went for a stroll around the Eiffel Tower and along the Seine with Sakadachi-kun (see tumblr). I then hopped on the Métro Line 6 and headed to the Cinémathèque Française at Bercy.  There was a long queue to get into the Tim Burton Exposition – the one that first appeared at the MOMA in 2009.  Even though they only allowed so many people in per hour, the exhibition was still overcrowded and hot.  I was surprised at the number of parents who had brought very young children to the exhibition.  I witnessed one young girl’s innocent childhood being blemished with nightmarish imagery as she stared as if transfixed at a figure of an infant with nails in it.  It was worth putting up with the crowds to see Johnny Depp’s Edward Scissorhands (1990) costume, as well as a long row of Jack Skellington heads from The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) in a lit display box.  Each head had a slightly different expression on it to give spectators an idea of the process of stop motion.

The regular museum of the Cinémathèque Française had free admission on this day.  It was smaller than I had expected, knowing what treasures are in the archives of the Cinémathèque Française, but there were indeed many delightful things on display.  Martin Scorcese has already donated some set pieces from Hugo (2011), but I was much more impressed to see the original magician’s coat from Georges Méliès’  A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune, 1920) in full colour and with hand-embroidered shapes on it.    Some of my favourite things on display at the museum:  a self portrait of Asta Nelson  (here it is on flickr, but it not as vibrantly coloured or as textured in postcard form), Mrs. Bates' head donated by Alfred Hitchcock shortly after the release of Psycho (1960), Mae West’s serpent turban from Leo Macarey’s Belle of the Nineties (1934), original poster art from Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko (1937), and Nikolai Cherkasov’s costume from Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (1944-6).

For fans of animation, there are many wonderful things to discover in the Cinémathèque Française.  On the walls just before one goes upstairs there is original art from Hans Richter’s Rythmus 23 (1923) and Viking Eggeling’s Symphonie Diagonale (1924).  The Cinémathèque also hold the collection of the pinscreen animation pioneers Alexandre Alexeieff and his wife Claire Parker.  On the upper level of the museum there are two pinscreens on display.  A tableau from 1930 – presumably the one used for the groundbreaking film Night on Bald Mountain (Une nuit sur le mont chauve, 1933)  and a larger screen from 1943.  The large screen holds approximately 1,140,000 pins and was restored for the Cinémathèque by NFB pinscreen animator Jacques Drouin.  The smaller tableau had the image of Bébé Nicolas on it – a character invented by Alexeieff to amuse his daughter when she was young.

There was great excitement at the Forum des images on Day 3, for Raoul Servais (official website) had come from Belgium to see his old friend Yuri Norstein.  I was drinking coffee in the Forum’s café when he entered and witnessed the warm embrace between the two men.  Norstein was delighted to see Servais and introduced him to the audience at the screening of Norstein’s early works and collaborations.  It was wonderful seeing Roman Kachanov’s enchanting The Mitten (1967) on 35mm.  Many of the films in this programme did not have subtitles, but this did not bother me because I had seen the ones with dialogue before.  The highlights of this programme were Ivan Ivanov-Vano and Norstein’s The Battle of Kerzhenets (1971) The Seasons (1969) on 35mm in their full widescreen glory.  They were truly a wonder to behold.

In the evening, Ilan Nguyen  and Serge Éric Ségura did a long presentation on the career of Kihachirō Kawamoto.  This included many rare photographs and video clips of Kawamoto and projects that he worked on throughout his career.  Nguyen teaches animation at Tokyo University of the Arts and is a well known animation expert in France.  He very kindly gave me programmes from the Nouvelles Images du Japon festivals that he assisted in organizing at the Forum des images in past years which have included showcase of the works of Osamu Tezuka, Yōji Kuri, Isao Takahata, Hayao Miyazaki, Satoshi Kon, Kōji Yamamura, and many others.  The French premiere of Kawamoto’s Winter Days occurred at the 2003 festival.  According to his profile on the website of the French periodical éclipses (revue de cinéma), Ségura is working on two books: one about the career of Servais and one about Kawamoto. 

The presentation opened with a clip of Kawamoto singing a Russian song on Japanese TV – which thoroughly delighted Norstein.  The main thrust of the presentation was to demonstrate the way in which Kawamoto had to wear many different hats during his life in order to make a living.  It is very difficult for independent animators to make a living on animation alone. 

There were photographs from Kawamoto’s early childhood – many of which were not in the two Japanese books profiling his life such as those of his mother Fuku (1891-1940) and his father Kinzaburō.  Kawamoto was born and raised in Sendagaya – the neighbourhood in which he was to live for the rest of his life.  His family dealt in porcelain.  There was a photograph of Kawamoto’s paternal grandmother Suzu Kawamoto (1861-1937) who was a major influence on the path his life was to take: teaching him how to make dolls and taking him to the theatre with her.

In the chapter I wrote on Kawamoto for Directory of World Cinema: Japan 2 (ed. John Berra, 2012), I mention the fact that Kawamoto was a big fan of Hollywood and European film of  the 1930s – even making dolls of Greta Garbo and Danielle Darrieux.  Nguyen and Ségura presented a pastel that Kawamoto had made of Swedish film star Zarah Leander next to the original photograph that he had used for inspiration as well as dolls he made of Audrey Hepburn and Brigitte Bardot.

For me the highlights of the presentation were photographs I had never seen before such as Kawamoto on the  set of productions at Toho including Senkichi Taniguchi’s Escape at Dawn (1950) and Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Actress (1947).  We saw clips of a Horoniga (character with a beer stein for a head used in advertisements for Asahi Beer in the 1940s and 50s) animated short directed by either Tadasu Iizawa (1909-94) or Tadahito Mochinaga (1919-99), as well as the first few minutes of Mochinaga’s Little Black Sambo (1956) – which I would have loved to have seen in its entirety.

They also had on hand first editions of the Toppan storybooks, which Shiba Pro later published internationally – such as the Golden Press Living Storybooks series.  I have written about my copy of The Little Tin Soldier (1968) – click here.  There were also clips from other animation Kawamoto had done for the NHK such as the opening credit sequence of Okaasan Ishō and Boo Foo Woo (1960-7).  There was a series of Asahi Beer commercials with the slogan “Watashi no biru” (My beer) which were hilarious send-ups of westerns – Kawamoto had apparently been a huge fan of westerns as a teen, particularly John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939). 

There was one bit of information that took me totally by surprise: I leaned that Kawamoto had elaborate tattoos on his back and upper arms.  Today in the west it has become quite commonplace for people to have tattoos, but in Japan such tattoos are associated with the yakuza.  Many sentō (public bath) have signs declaring that people with tattoos are not welcome to bathe there.  Kawamoto had his tattoos done between 1956 and 1963 apparently as a kind of act of rebellion; a way of marking himself as an individual.  Ségura and Nguyen even showed us a photograph of Kawamoto’s tattoos taken from the rear with him only wearing a fundoshi (traditional male underwear).  This was followed by a series of photographs from Kawamoto’s trip to Eastern Europe.  I looked at the famous photograph of Kawamoto with Jiří Trnka (1912-69) with new eyes.  Kawamoto looks very conservative in his suit: a small, unassuming man in contrast to the hulking form of Trnka.  To think that under that smart suit, Kawamoto was hiding an elaborate work of tattoo art!

One of the questions that had been niggling at me for some time was the mystery of Kawamoto’s first feature film: Rennyo and his Mother (1981).  This 93 min. puppet animation never plays at retrospectives of Kawamoto’s career and has never been made available on video or DVD.  They showed a clip from the film and it looks absolutely stunning.   After the presentation, I asked Nguyen about the availability of the film and he said that it also screens rarely in Japan as the rights are held by the religious organization who commissioned it.  The scenario for the film was written by Kaneto Shindō (Kuroneko, Onibaba) and it features voice acting by Kyōko Kishida and Tetsuko Kuroyanagi.  Although it was not a personal project of Kawamoto's, rather a commissioned work to order, I still feel the work is significant and would love to see it some day.

During the overview of the latter half of Kawamoto’s career there were photographs of him at festivals and other events around the world.  Notable photographs included one of him with Yuri Norstein at 1985 animation festival in Varna – which is the occasion on which the two of them became friends, with Jim Henson in 1986, with Břetislav Pojar at Annecy in 1987, in Shangai in 1987 signing the contact to make To Shoot Without Shooting (1988), and with Karel Zeman and Nicole Saloman at Hiroshima in 1987.  The presentation concluded with footage from the Kawamoto memorial service in 2010 which featured a very moving march of the large puppets from his NHK special series Romance of the Three Kingdoms. 

The presentation was followed by Takashi Namiki’s documentary Living With Puppets: The World of Kihachirō Kawamoto (1999) – read my review here.  The weekend concluded with a screening of Kawamoto shorts including a rare screening of Tadahito Mochinaga’s Little Black Sambo and the Twins (1957), for which Kawamoto had crafted puppets.  Read about this film here.  I slipped out of the final screening event after this film, for I had seen all the other films many times before.

 

with the illustrious Alexis Hunot

I had a chance on the final day of the Kawamoto-Norstein event to get to know animation expert Alexis Hunot a bit better.  I am a longtime fan of his blog Zewebanim and was pleased to find that he is also a fan of this blog.  It turns out that the review that I wrote about Takashi Namiki’s book Animated People in Photo, struck a personal chord with Alexis because his uncle Jean-Luc Xiberras (April 1, 1941- December 26, 1998) is featured in the book.  My blog post apparently triggered Alexis to track down a copy of the photograph for his mother.  Xiberras was the director of Annecy from 1982 until his passing in December 1998.  It was under Xiberras’ direction that Annecy moved from being a biennale to an annual event in 1998.  There is an interview with Xiberras from 1997 on AWN as well as a touching homage to him from 1999 in English and French with tributes written by Frédéric Back, Bruno Edera, and many others. 

Alexis Hunot did his studies in cinema, but his love of animation began when he discovered the works of Back, Norstein, and Jan Švankmajer at Annecy 1987 where he worked as an assistant.  He teaches at Gobelins  and has a monthly radio programme with Florentine Grelier about animation with called Bulles de rêves.   You can see a video of him giving a lecture here, and here is the interview he did with Yuri Norstein.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

PREVIOUSLY: Kawamoto-Norstein @Forum des Images, Day 2 (Part II)

FIRST ENTRY IN THIS SERIES: Kawamoto-Norstein @ Forum des Images, Day 1

Muybridge’s Strings Road Show

It’s an exciting year for animation at the NFB of Canada with new work by top independent animators like Koji Yamamura, Georges Schwitzgebel, Co Hoedeman, Paul Driessen, and the animation duo Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis.

Koji Yamamura’s hotly anticipated film Muybridge’s Strings (Les Cordes de Muybridge/マイブリッジの糸, 2011) will be having a three week “Road Show” this fall at the Tokyo Metropolitan Photography in Ebisu.

Can time be made to stand still? Can it be reversed? Koji Yamamura’s Muybridge’s Strings is a meditation on this theme, contrasting the worlds of the photographer Eadweard Muybridge—who in 1878 successfully photographed consecutive phases in the movement of a galloping horse—and a mother who, watching her daughter grow up, realizes she is slipping away from her. Moving between California and Tokyo, between the nineteenth century and the twenty-first, the film focuses on some of the highpoints in Muybridge’s troubled life and intercuts them with the mother’s surrealistic daydreams—a poetic clash that explores the irrepressible human desire to seize life’s fleeting moments, to freeze the instants of happiness. Enriched by Koji Yamamura’s refined artistry and Normand Roger’s soundtrack, Muybridge’s Strings observes the ties that cease to bind, fixes its gaze on the course of life, and presents a moment in time suspended on the crystalline notes of a canon by J.S. Bach. (2011,12’39”) Source: NFB

From September 17 until October 7th, visitors can either watch a half hour screening dedicated to Muybridge’s Strings and how it was made or an hour-long program of recent works by Yamamura with some of his favourite NFB animated shorts including Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis’s latest work Wild Life (2011). The other Yamamura films being screened are Fig (無花果/Ichijiku, 2007), which was Yamamura’s contribution to Image Forum’s omnibus animation Tokyo Loop (read review), and A Child’s Metaphysics (こどもの形上学/Kodomo no Keijijyōgaku, 2007). A Child’s Metaphysics is a terrific little film but was a bit overshadowed by the success of A Country Doctor (カフカ田舎医者/Kafuka Inaka Isha, 2007) which was released in the same year. A Child’s Metaphysics is available on DVD in the States from Kimstim/Zeitgeist.

Program A (28 minutes)

Muybridge’s Strings + The Making Of

Muybridge’s Strings (Koji Yamamura, 2011)

The Making of Muybridge’s Strings: Tokyo/Montréal

Program B (63 minutes)

Muybridge’s Strings + Selected NFB Animated Shorts + Selected Works By Yamamura

Canon (Norman McLaren, 1964)

Mindscape (Jacques Drouin, 1976)

The Bead Game (Ishu Patel, 1977)

Jeu (Georges Schwitzgebel, 2005)

Wild Life (Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby, 2011)

Fig (Koji Yamamura, 2006)

A Child’s Metaphysics (Koji Yamamura, 2007)

Muybridge’s Strings (Koji Yamamura, 2011)

Go to the official website or Facebook page for more information including film descriptions, bios, and a screening schedule. (JP only)

The short program costs 500 yen and the extended program 1,000 yen.

Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (MAP)

〒153-0062　Yebisu Garden Place, 1-13-3 Mita Meguro-ku Tokyo

Tel.03-3280-0099／Fax.03-3280-0033

Support Koji Yamamura buy ordering his work on DVD:

Order from Japan via cdjapan:

Tokyo Loop (JP only - but no dialogue)

The Old Crocodile and Selected Works (JP/EN/FR)

Mt. Head and Selected Works  (JP with English subs)

Kafka Inaka Isha (JP only)

From the US:

Akino Kondoh Selected for the Guggenheim's You Tube Play

The digest version of Akino Kondoh’s Ladybirds’ Requiem (てんとう虫のおとむらい/Tenshō Mushi no Otomurai) was chosen earlier this week as one of twenty-five short videos for the Guggenheim Museum’s first biennial You Tube Play celebration of creative video. With this project, the Guggenheim aims to harness the power of video-streaming sites like You Tube to promote contemporary art. Their goal was to “attract innovative, original, and surprising videos from around the world, regardless of genre, technique, background, or budget. This global online initiative is not a search for what’s “now,” but a search for what’s next.”

Here the Jury explains the selection process:

The Guggenheim’s call for entries attracted over 23,000 videos from 91 countries. In September, the Guggenheim curators drew up a short list of 125 videos. Akino Kondoh was one of only two Japanese artists to make the short list. The other was Hiroshi Takahashi with his ikebana inspired piece Wow Tenspace (2007). Takahashi is the president and founder of WOW, a design studio based in Tokyo, Sendai and Florence. Designers who worked on Wow Tenspace included Shingo Abe, Tomoyo Kimpara, Yoko Ishii, Hiroshi Ouchi, Shigeru Makino, Takuma Nakazi, Daihei Shibata, and Shi Lin. The artwork used in the animation was designed by Shun Kawakami of Artless Inc.

 

An international jury was selected to narrow down the short list to just twenty-five works. The jury included Nancy Spector as the chairperson, Laurie Anderson, Animal Collective, Darren Aronofsky, Douglas Gordon, Ryan McGinley, Marilyn Minter, Takashi Murakami, Shirin Neshat, Stefan Sagmeister, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Here Takashi Murakami explains what he looks for in video art:

At the core of Murakami’s expectations for the Guggenheim project is this statement: “I expect the video submissions to showcase the unique nature of video and You Tube. I hope to see the kind of work which is recognizable as art with just a single glance.” 

Akino Kondoh, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at Shinsedai in July (read about our chat here), does indeed fulfill this brief. As much as I love watching animation on 16mm film it is an expensive and inconsistent medium. Computer technology has freed artists like Kondoh to be able to work affordably and efficiently as independent animators.  Kondoh draws each of the individual frames of her animations by hand with careful attention paid to every detail. These details are preserved during the scanning and editing process and the result is a mesmerizing animation experience. Each frame of Kondoh’s Ladybirds’ Requiem stands on its own as an individual piece of art. 

Kondoh embraced the digital medium early on it her career and her very first film The Evening Traveling (電車かもしれない/Densha kamoshirenai, 2002) NHK program Digital Stadium which also promotes artists via web streaming.  The Guggenheim selection will undoubtedly widen Kondoh’s international fan base even further. My congratulations to Kondoh for this great achievement and I can’t wait to see what she produces next!

The work of Akino Kondoh will be featured in a number of upcoming events:

Tokyo Designers Week 2010, October 29 – November 3 at Jingu-Gaien Kaigakanmae
PISAF, November 5-9 in Puchon Korea
Domani・明日展2010, December 11 – January 23, at The National Art Center, Tokyo

Kusama: Princess of Polka Dots

American experimental and documentary filmmaker Heather Lenz is currently in production with a documentary on the life and career of Yayoi Kusama (草間彌生). According to the official website for the film, the debut of the film will coincide with the retrospective planned by the Film Arts Foundation in celebration of Kusama's 80th birthday in 2009. The retrospective, Yayoi Kusama: An Odyssey will travel to at least four venues in the States and Europe, though the venues have not yet been announced.

Kusama’s art is shaped by her long struggle with mental illness. She herself claims that her famous polka dot motif comes from her hallucinations and dreams. Ever since I encountered the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland a decade ago, I have been fascinated by l’art brut (literally ‘rough art’, it usually means self-taught artists removed from mainstream art or mentally ill artists). Often l’art brut has a loneliness or deep melancholy about it, which can be very depressing. What makes Yayoi Kusama’s art so unique, is that her obsessions and experience with mental illness expresses itself in colourful art, that I actually find quite uplifting.

Kusama made a name for herself in1960s New York City. A friend to Andy Warhol, and other avant-garde artists of the times, she organized weird and wonderful mass events, known as ‘Kusama Happenings”, in places like Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge, often in protest against the war in Vietnam. As an artist, she has dabbled in painting, sculpture, installations, performance art, fashion design, poetry, novels, and experimental films.

I am really excited at how this documentary about Kusama’s life and art will turn out. It looks as if it will take a feminist approach to Kusama’s struggles with mental illness and her career as an eccentric artist. The producers and project advisors are all women, and the promotional clip features a variety of women speaking about Kusama’s relationship with her art.

As a side note, when I went to the website of Lausanne’s Collection de l’Art Brut in order to make the hyperlink for this article, I noticed that they are featuring a special exhibition on Japanese l’art brut until September 28th. What a coincidence! The exhibition features twelve self-taught artists including Shinichi Sawada, Satoshi Nishikawa, Mitsuteru Ishino, Hidenori Motooka, Masao Obata, Yuji Tsuji, Takashi Shuji, Takanori Herai, Toshimitsu Tomizuka, Eijiro Miyama, Tohshiaki Yoshikawa, and Moriya Kishaba. They have also produced a catalogue and a DVD for purchase at the museum.

A travelling exhibition, called Crossing Spirit, is currently touring Japan and will be at the Borderless Art Museum (NO-MA) in Omihachiman until May, followed by the Shiodome Museum in Tokyo until July.

Osamu Tezuka at Showa-kan

The Showa-kan, a Tokyo museum dedicated to wartime and post-war Occupation Japan, is currently running a free-of-charge special exhibition on the experiences of Osamu Tezuka (手塚治虫). Through photographs, archival objects, and original drawings by Tezuka, the exhibit demonstrates the impact that the war had on the budding artist. The most powerful displays are the ones that put documentary photographs of the war next to wartime scenes from Tezuka's manga. The war forced young Tezuka (born in 1928) to grow up very quickly. The horrors that he witnessed (the firebombing of Osaka) and the hardships that he endured (wartime labour in a munitions factory) left their mark in his later work. Tezuka's manga and anime often feature a hero - his most famous is Astro Boy (鉄腕アトム) - fighting for peace and justice against a violent, totalitarian force.

The exhibition is entirely in Japanese, but most of the materials are visual and many of them speak for themselves. Fans of Tezuka will have an opporunity to examine original drawings up close as well as get a look at original cover art for Tezuka's manga such as Shin Takarajima, Lost World, Metropolis, and many more. The museum can be found at Kudanshita Station (on the Tozai, Toei Shinjuku, or Hanzomon lines).

Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atom) DVD Box 2 [Priced-down Reissue]

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2007

Takenaka & Marlene Dietrich

I saw an exhibition this week at the Yayoi Art Museum of the work of Eitaro Takanaka (竹中英太郎, 1906-1988). The Yayoi Museum specializes in magazine illustrations - particular pre-war illustrations. I have seen amazing exhibitions there of art from children's magazines of teh 1920s and 1930s where you could see the influence of style on animation that developed after the war.

Takanaka specialized in illustrations for thrillers, horror, and detective stories. In the 1960s and 1970s, he did some amazing, vibrantly coloured surreal paintings. He also did a series of paintings inspired by Marlene Dietrich, such as the one above. The poster below advertises a performance by Dietrich in Tokyo in 1974 (昭和49). I love the placement of the moth (detail follows at bottom). It says so much about Dietrich as a sensual, transformative creature. I would love to have it as a poster to frame on the wall! She would have been in her seventies, but Takanaka clearly sees her as still being at the peak of her powers of seduction.

Der Blaue Engel is available on DVD in Japan with commentary footage from Nagaharu Yodogawa:

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2006

Nihonga 6: Nakagami Kiyoshi

“I trust my sense of vision. Not in the sense that it is never mistaken but because of its capacity to discover something entirely different from what is ordinarily seen. To put it more accurately, I trust it because of its capacity for misunderstanding and because of its ability to discover space. I trust its capacity for making people awake of light, faraway time and infinity, in a simple flat space without depth. I have a deep faith in representation that transcends the individual and attains universality.”

– Nakagami Kiyoshi

More than three weeks after attending the Nihonga exhibition, work of Nakagami Kiyoshi (中上清) remains an enigma to me. All of the works on display were untitled and seemed to depict the sun obscured by hazy smog and dark clouds. Sometimes titles can be the key to unlocking meaning in a given painting, but sometimes (as in the case of Matsui Fuyuko) artists use the title to impose their intentions too heavily upon the spectator. These paintings remind me of afternoons spent looking up at the clouds and creating imaginary worlds on their billowing peaks and valleys. Yet, unlike such clouds on a summer’s day, Nakagami’s clouds have a melancholy about them. To truly appreciate Nakagami’s work, I would need to spend more time with the paintings. It would be great to have one of the paintings in a room that has natural light so that one could observe how the painting changes with the subtle variations in the quality of light throughout the day.

© cmmhotes 2006

Nihonga 5: Kosemura Mami

Of all the Nihonga artists represented at the Yokohama exhibition, I found the work of Kosemura Mami (小瀬村真美) the most fascinating. I have not seen very many film installations before, so perhaps I will sound naïve when I describe how spellbinding I found Kosemura’s moving paintings. Each moving painting was inspired by a traditional painting. I haven’t had a chance to muddle my way through the interview with the artist to see if it describes her techniques, but it looked as though she filmed both real objects and painting objects, sometimes in real time, sometimes it looked as though the images had been composed frame by frame. Each moving painting is a DVD of varying length (5 to 23 minutes) being played on endless repeat.

The first moving painting one encounters is one of the series Flowering Plants of the Four Seasons (shown above). I believe that the first one represented spring (I’m not sure where summer was lurking, but I never found it). It consisted of a large canvas onto which two side-by-side overlapping DVD images were being projected together. The back side of the canvas had the autumn version of the same scene. From a distance, it looks like an illuminated painting of a pond scene complete with a realistic soundtrack of pond sounds (breeze, water, insects). The movements within the scene are subtle: the breeze gently ruffling leaves and causing reads to bob up and down. It is only when one looks closely at the scene can one see the digital artefacts of the medium. The winter scene was even more sparing with a pair of bamboo trees and a flowering plant set against a concrete wall as snow softly falls and coats the plants.

It was truly magical to watch these scenes evolve in subtle ways and it has left me pondering the relationship between a still painting and spectator and how it too evolves over time. Here is what the artist herself has to say about her own thought processes:

What interested me most about the folding screen paintings or wall paintings that were the basis for Flowering Plants of the Four Seasons was the fact that there is no boundary between painting a real object while looking at it and copying an image that has already been painted. Both types of sketching are related to the act of observing everyday reality.

A flower changes slightly and is given a new form as it moves lightly from one picture to another.

I feel a similar sensation in the gradual changes in vision that occur when editing my woks. How much can the form of the flower vary and still be identified with the real object? At what point should it be seen as an artificial creation?

Even if the flower takes on a strange form removed from its everyday condition through a gradual process of editing, our awareness is quickly brought back to everyday reality when it begins to move before our eyes

The two paintings could be enjoyed while sitting on a raised tatami mat the artist had provided for her spectators (as in the photo at the very top -- but it is from an earlier exhibitionby the same artist). In Priming Water, instead of projecting onto a blank screen was replaced by an old wooden Japanese sliding door. I’m not sure if it is what is known as a shoji door or if it has another name, as only the top half of the door had the square pattern with the rice paper. The bottom half of the door was a long rectangle of rice paper onto which an image of pond water was projected from behind the screen. In the pond water, one could see carp surfacing. Their movements were very realistic, as were the sound effects. The image, however looked painted, and I suspect that Kosemura may have painted the scene frame by frame in order to animate it.

The other painting that could be viewed from the tatami was inspired by Hashiguchi Goyo’s woodblock print Woman with Kimono Undergarment (1920). This moving painting, titled simply Woman in the Mirror, was either projected from behind the wall or involves a modified flat screen tv. The image was projected onto a tall Japanese mirror with a wooden frame that attached to a very low make-up cabinet. It had clearly been designed so a Japanese woman could do her hair and make-up while seated on the floor and then could stand and see her full profile in the mirror. The scene was of a traditional Japanese room with tatami, shot at a canted angle that recreated what one would see in a mirror reflection of one’s room. For this moving painting, Kosemura had dressed a model in a kimono with the same colour (red and white) as in the Hashiguchi painting. The woman was not looking at herself directly in the mirror but the spectator would catch fleeting glimpses of her as she passed partially into the frame and out again. We never see her face but do see her adjust her kimono. The image was slightly jerky and gave me the impression that it might have been done using the technique of pixilation, an innovation made famous by Norman McLaren in his animation Neigbours (NFB, 1952) though it had already been invented back in the early days of filmmaking. This technique involves actors being filmed frame-by-frame instead of in real time, turning the actor into a kind of stop-motion puppet.

Kosemura’s last moving painting, Comb, uses the same technique. Inspired by Hashiguchi’s woodblock print Woman Combing her Hair (1920). Again, Kosemura uses a model dressed in a similarly coloured kimono (this time a blue pattern) and again the model’s face is obscured as we watch her slowly brushing her hair. Again, this moving image has a painterly quality to it. These last two paintings have had me thinking about the male artist as voyeur, a term more commonly used when speaking about photography than traditional Japanese art. Kosemura’s work changed the way I looked at the Hashiguchi paintings and I wondered about his relationship to these two women he has captured in such an intimate and personal space.

I spent the most time in this room, as Kosemura has reignited my interest in the relationship between art, time, and space. The beautifully rendered moving paintings capture the poetry found in the minutiae of daily life. As in an Ozu film, even the briefest of gestures denotes volumes of meaning, if only we take the time to look and appreciate its worth.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2006