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2019

The Paintings of Kazue Yoshikawa – a Speculative Consideration                                                       
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Toshiaki Minemura

 

The oldest works in this collection are from 1984. At the time, Kazue Yoshikawa would have been 39 years of age. I have not actually seen her paintings from that period, but I have here beside me a catalogue from her second solo exhibition, held at an art gallery in Hamburg in October 1986, and the ten or so paintings contained within give me an idea of her painting style around the period from 1984 to 1985.

 

 They are an impressive group of paintings. Most of the works feature a heavy, deep base of spreading ultramarine blue, which imbues the works with a peaceful sense of composure even while being encroached upon by bold brush strokes and splotches of color. Since all these paintings contain elements of turmoil, it is not the painting design itself which is composed. This depth of blue, which draws in the turmoil, is what gives the painting expression as a whole this impression of composure.

 

 At the same time, all of the paintings have parts which seem to extend beyond the painting edges and parts which overlap, and in the midst of all of this differing colors or painting styles or subjects impose upon each other, connect with each other, break away from each other, or sometimes completely disregard each other. This edgy juxtaposition and overlaying in the paintings and this method of intentionally placing different subjects or motifs in an absurd disconnect brings to mind the North American version of the Neo-expressionist movement which swept the globe around the 1980s, particularly the intelligent painting composition of David Salle. This characteristic demonstrates, at the very least, that Kazue Yoshikawa was a child of the 80s.

 

 However, with Salle and the German Neo-expressionists of his generation, we do not see anything like the faith – or is it affection? – that Kazue Yoshikawa places in this deep, penetrating ultramarine. I recall to mind the astonishing wall-sized work displayed at the end of the Hamburg gallery exhibition catalogue (the work entitled Blau in this collection). A black design like drooping leaves and the long, continuous trail of a moving brush sinks into an immense expanse of ultramarine blue, with what appear to be extraneous pieces of wood propped in front of the painting as part of the installation, but the blue placidity seems to swallow any intellectual contrivances or attempts at division or analysis. This is why, when I look at this painting, or the color-centric abstract paintings in shades of green or blue that even very recently have continued to dominate half of the wall space at Kazue Yoshikawa painting exhibitions, with the other half now occupied by symbolic figurative paintings of fashion models or Mickey Mouse, I like to think that half of this artist’s body of paintings is not so reflective of the generation of the 1980s, a time when divisions and colliding realities were brought to the forefront, but more connected to modernists like Matisse, Yves Klein and Miró who used fields of color in an attempt to integrate the senses and emotions. Or perhaps Kazue Yoshikawa’s distinctive use of spatial fields of color springs from the same root as the traditional decorative painting of Japan, particularly the art of Tawaraya Sotatsu, and was awakened by her encounter with the works of the aforementioned modern and contemporary painters. One cannot help but sense this, for there is something about her unwillingness to relinquish this color-centric style of abstract painting which hints at something more deeply rooted and tenacious than the mere appropriation of a Western painting style.

 

 However, it should not be denied that the paramount issue in Kazue Yoshikawa’s works is division. This division does not seem like something innate, but rather a foreign element summoned by the artist’s intellect. However, the divisions we saw in the 1980s were made apparent by differentiating between elements which existed in the form of the painting itself, and the method of resolving these divisions was also achieved through the language of the painting. In other words, the representational subjects, the painting methods, the painting materials and even the support mediums were digested through the language of painting and enveloped in that penetrating field of ultramarine blue, becoming an integrated whole.

 

 After the 1990s, however, Yoshikawa partially renounced this opportune method of resolution, and intentionally began to embrace subjects that could not fully be handled by the familiar language of abstract painting. The intellect of this painter, who believed her paintings should correspond to the day and age, or to society, no doubt demanded this. Her 36-painting series Dolly, artistic renderings of Judeo-Christian legend culminating with the sheep who was the first animal to be cloned from an adult cell, was centered upon a specific subject and ended after this single series, but her pattern of arranging multi-row sequences of symbolic human figures (for example, fashion models) which commenced in the late 2000s is something she persistently carries on to this day. While persistent, this subject reflects a satirical intelligence on the part of the artist rather than any personal taste or emotion, and the works do not make any effort to reconcile contradictions or divisions, but instead serve as a presentation of examples that is just short of cynicism.

 

 There is nothing encouraging about these cynical, Gerhard Richter-like displays of reality. In fact, when this artist coldly lays out these several dozen paintings featuring the faces or figures of fashion models that have been culled from printed material, she for some reason also stubbornly adheres to a policy of exhibiting on another wall, away from this cluster of social and societal symbols, paintings that seem to be the work of an entirely different individual, abstract works with eddies of paint in shades of blue and green that brim with the innate emotional sense of the artist. This seems to manifest a realization that there is no way to reconcile the contradictions or divisions which exist between elements such as the abstract and the figurative, or painting expression and reality, and that any attempt to achieve unity or harmony in the same plane is, in the end, obsolete and futile.

 

 However, perhaps the artist anticipates something that may come from an expanded application of contemporary “reception aesthetics.” In other words, even if she presents us with a division as wide as this, if the receptors belonging to us, the observers who inhabit the age which gave birth to this division and live in the divisions of society itself, function to their fullest in ways that are multifaceted and transcendental, it should be possible for us to positively appreciate this division as the expression of the reality of a new age.

 

 Of course, this observation may be criticized as speculation, rather than critical analysis. But if a painter is determined to expose the divisions of our times and civilization itself, even if this results in irreconcilable divisions within her creative work, which is a grave risk in the art of painting, it is not worth it for a critic, even if he does not align himself with this decision, and even if he takes a similar risk – venturing into theories that may fall into the realm of vain speculation – to ask whether there is a way forward for this kind of art?

November 24, 2019

 

2019

The Works of Kazue Yoshikawa – the Intersection of Water Weeds and Genre Painting, and Diversity

Tetsuo Shimizu (art critic, professor of Tokyo Zokei University)

 

 got off at the shinkansen station, and, walking in the general direction I thought I needed to go, soon found myself at a tree-filled space which felt like a park. On my left was a fairly good-sized river swollen with water, and I seemed to glimpse the aquatic weeds that grew within. I followed a stream, or waterway, which flowed away from this park as I continued towards the gallery I was headed for. The water level was quite high, probably because of the weather up until the day before, and the yanagimo water weeds which gently swayed with the current made the waterway seem completely full. I then made a left turn, and on my right side a row of densely leaved trees came into view (after learning that this was the Mishima Taisha Shrine, I later paid the shrine a visit.) Shortly afterwards, I noticed the gallery on my left.

 Brushing the water’s surface, swaying with the generously flowing current, yet firmly asserting their own existence. Like these graceful yanagimo water weeds, the shapes in Kazue Yoshikawa’s paintings found free expression upon the canvas. In the paintings, lacquer was used. Lacquer is normally used to coat the surface of craft or wood products, adding luster to these surfaces. Lacquer is a material that is seldom used in paintings – but Kazue Yoshikawa uses it. This gives the surface of her paintings a unique material expressiveness that differs from the physical texture of oil paints or distinctive surface feel of acrylic paints.   

 The ultramarine-dominated variations of blue in her paintings are beautiful. Upon this, she makes bold use of black, and here we can sense what gives Yoshikawa’s paintings their distinctive character. At the same time, there are also moist shades of green that bring those water weeds to mind, and a wine-reddish color that is more red than brown. The contrast between these colors makes the blues and greens stand out vividly. These colors overlap in a variety of ways in each of the works, which results in the diverse range of expression in the paintings, from an impression of brightness to deeply sunken tones. The color black is often seen as a definitive element in paintings, one that can destroy the connection between other colors, and for that reason it tends to be avoided. In Kazue Yoshikawa’s paintings, however, it is this black that in fact sets the other colors in the paintings free. Blue, black and green; blue, pale wine red, black, more wine red; blue and black only – this black, while its use is restrained, actually finds expression as a contemplative color that informs us of the strong will that lies within. No less than the water weeds swaying in the natural springs of Mount Fuji, Yoshikawa’s blues and blacks seem to strive for utter transparency; beautiful, they seemed to have the ability to purify those who observed them.

 Meanwhile, in another part of the gallery, rows of Yoshikawa’s distinctive genre paintings were displayed on the walls. The juxtaposition of these genre paintings with the other works is what gives Kazue Yoshikawa’s world of painting its special quality. The juxtaposition and coexistence of two very different elements: an extremely formal group of paintings (formal in terms of the types of materials used, the physical quality, the colors expressed by the coloring material on the canvas, and the incorporation of textures) and another group of works depicting a cross-section of the people she observes on the streets of the cities she has visited, as lifted from the pages of a fashion magazine. However, it is in this juxtaposition and coexistence that I personally sense Yoshikawa’s upraised fist, something akin to her crying out as an artist. Formal and normal (≒ the abnormal, society, daily life, absurdity). Is it not here, in the contradiction between the two, where Kazue Yoshikawa the artist seems to finds herself in her element? In fact, these two bodies of work seem to persistently and repeatedly provoke one another, and give shape to the other. It is actually on the basis of this contradiction and through this contradiction that she attempts to illuminate our society and world. This diversity, and the desire and strong determination for it, is no doubt the driving force behind Yoshikawa’s works.

 The Book of Genesis and the Clone Sheep, Tsunami, The World of Ancient Greece… While producing paintings during a long painting career which began in the 1980s, Yoshikawa has also engaged in speaking out. This may be something which resulted from living not only in Japan, but moving from country to country. Unanchored, she travels between two – no, multiple – worlds, and continually experiences new encounters and differences. The process of friction arising from this has given rise to a voice which could not be stilled from inside Yoshikawa, and has shaped her discourse. This is not, however, limited to a social, external voice, but even more than that, it also seems powerfully directed at the core of the artist’s own inner expression. The expression of these words is what supports Yoshikawa’s works at their most fundamental level.

 In the midst of the diversity which is cultivated and made richer by opening ourselves widely to others and forming relationships, we are able to savor the most elemental human activity of expressing ourselves, as denoted by Einbildungskraft (“imagination,” a compound of ein [= into one], bild [= painting, picture, image] and kraft [= power, ability]). I myself habitually take this philosophical term to imply that the act of living is like painting a picture of every moment one experiences, and I have chosen to use this as a guiding principle of my life.

  I believe that Kazue Yoshikawa’s paintings are deeply related to Einbildunskraft. Like the supple yet resilient water weeds growing in the rivers of Mishima, these fresh, vividly colored paintings are made possible by the contemplation, the discourse, and the voices which deepen in the contradictions between West and East, the individual and nature, art and society… The colors which strive for utter transparency upon her canvas gain their depth of color through the process of the intersection of discourse and painting, and diversity. This is where I find the beauty, the strength, and the potential of the works of Kazue Yoshikawa.

 

Various things change rapidly in today’s society, day after day, amid varied senses of values. This is an era when it is hard to grasp things by a single sense of values.

 In such an era, I believe, it is not enough for an artist to pursue his or her own self individually. It seems to me that the duty of today’s artists is to seek their respective ways of expression while watching the situation in which we find ourselves.

 The IT industry advances and artificial intelligence will obtain learning ability and be ready to help us. However, it is said that artificial intelligence may outdo humans in certain aspects in the future. We already depend on computer technology on all occasions. Thanks to electronic information, I myself am living in Germany just the same way I would in Japan.

 Hamburg, where I live, is a big city, but it has plenty of green areas. Forty years have already passed since I came here. My discoveries in this German environment have been those of a culture distinct from German (Western) culture.

 Since I came to Germany, I have on various occasions asked myself who I am. On each occasion I recognized that I bore, besides my own looks, a culture and sensibility that a country had produced through its long history. While being attracted by Japanese traditional decorativeness – as found in traditional outfits – I have made many abstract paintings using chemical lacquer, a medium alien from Japanese tradition.

 In about 1995, as an extension to abstract painting, I began doing representational paintings. It was because I could utilize various forms found in the actual world, which had some narrative nature, for pictorial expression by representation. It was to represent a variegated, not uniform, world.

 And my discovery of – superficial – decorativeness that lay at the root of myself was made through fashion magazines found everywhere. We can say that we spend much time in a virtual world of fashions, among others. That is, fashions can make up a paradoxical contemporary realism.

 On the other hand, we cannot survive having nothing to do with nature. We see natural landscapes – a deep forest, for example. Such nature and a virtual, civilized society. I intend to make paintings which represent these two conflicting aspects*, in order to create an archetypal image of the world today. Even if the accelerating development of artificial intelligence materializes robots as intelligent as humans, we shall never discard our instinctive joy of imagination, which has produced everything.

 As German artist or art activist Joseph Beuys said, “Everyone is an artist.”

 We in the world should construct a system for coexistence of humans and artificial intelligence in the future, without losing our spiritual richness. The duty of today’s artists is to accept the realities of the world and indicate ways toward such coexistence, I believe.

 *two aspects: abstract painting (made only from natural feelings) and representational painting (made via photography)

 

2013 Kazue Yoshikawa concept

[Ancient Greeks used to keenly and incessantly question the sounds of leaves, fountains and winds, that is, the oscillation of “nature,” to find in it a certain form of intelligence, it is said. And, as for me, I listen to the sound of verbal activities and question the oscillation of meaning – for me, a modern man, “nature” is nothing else but verbal activities.]

Speaking in relation to these words of Roland Barthes, verbal activities that are “nature” for him are for me activities of expression. In other words, materials to be dealt with by modern painting. And “materials” for me is a section of innumerable examples of informational culture discharged by this civilized society.

Of course I do have strong resonance, like did ancient Greeks (or Japanese in old times), with proper nature such as the sounds of leaves and winds. However, on the other hand, I think it is necessary for us to listen to many examples of pseudo nature produced incessantly by modern technological civilization and question them.

Although this might be misleading, but I dare to call such pseudo nature and informational culture produced day and night “paradoxical nature.” Then, it could be said that the informational world of fashion is a symbol of such things.

Fashion models, by the way, have faces. Of course their faces are those of properly natural humans. But once they get commercialized through technology of civilization that is information, they become “faces” of pseudo nature. In other words, it seems that the face, the most symbolic sphere of drama in the human body, comes to have the symbolism of “paradoxical nature.”

When I started my creative work like from scratch at a Hamburg art college, I used to paint in lacquer (industrial paint) instead of oil. Still now I use lacquer in parallel. By using lacquer, an industrial material, I certainly intended to question the relationship between “painting and nature” in modern civilization. And it was kind of inevitable for me to take up, besides paint as a physical material, an “artificial sweetener – fashion” borne by modern times and explore my own painting. It is easy to disregard such artificial pseudo nature as “merchandise of human alienation” discharged incessantly by this material civilization.

However, in painting, let’s put aside such monistic logic and look at the “paradoxical nature” that cannot be ignored in reality. Painting it by hand, in bodily action, to keep questioning modernity, is a way of being for painting, I believe.

2012 Kazue Yoshikawa concept 

Lawsuits between Apple and Samsung hitting the headlines, people queuing for the former’s new products the day before they go on sale. Such scenes have become common in Japan as well as in Germany. In the world, competition for the novelty of products is growing even crazier.

Goods constitute a system in which pleasure and freshness for the retina and the tympanum, in addition to convenience, are produced and consumed endlessly. If so, even sensibility, which ought to be differentiated between different individuals, is being institutionalized within the market mechanism and the logic of consumption. That is the reality today. A remark on fashion written by Jacques Lacan that “unconsciousness is others’ sayings” suggests it. Fashion is a typical example of informational goods that command man’s sensibility. Therefore, to cut out its delicate looks could be a way for painting to engage in the reality.

And, not only goods as things but also information that fills our living space are constantly replaced by something new. It seems as if we are obsessed with the mass production and mass consumption of “novelty.” It is not that incessant information is flowing in our time; but our time is swallowed and lost in the flood of endless information, I feel.

Amid such consumption of information and time lies today’s society that gets paralyzed and amnesic even more. Even that 3-11 may be swallowed in this logic of consumption and go weathered.

 

Now, I look at the numbers “3-11” again. They, like 8-15 or 9-11 or 99%, bear a definite and symbolized meaning. Numbers, like common nouns, are essentially free of specific meanings but, in some cases, come to be used like proper nouns with particular meanings. Contrarily, the place name Fukushima, when written FUKUSHIMA, is converted from a proper noun into a universal common noun.

Such special changes of verbal symbols, that is, numbers turning proper nouns and place names becoming common nouns, could mean “memory’s symbolization/universalization” in some phenomena. When we think about such a function of language, we feel the resonance, with a certain degree of significance, of Milan Kundera’s remark: “Memory is a weapon for weak man against power.”

 

On the other hand, painting (fine arts) means an attempt to free all things and signs from the yoke of “meanings = institutions.” And, images in a painting, whether they are things or signs, are recovery and play of colors and shapes that have escaped from meaning.

So, although it is paradoxical, it may be possible to question painting itself by taking into it signs (words) with the most “fixed meanings,” for example, “3-11” and “FUKUSHIMA.”

In other words, because the representational nature (the nature of signs) in painting expression always neighbors dense meaning, it is to shift between meaning and no-meaning, taking advantage of meaning inversely, and thereby to relativize the yoke of meaning. It will mean that “meaning becomes the vanishing point of pleasure” and the “noise” of painting “means exemption from meaning” (Roland Barthes).

 

 

 

2001

Organic Integrity   The Art of Kazue Yoshikawa                                                      Dr. Hans-Joachim  Manske

 

 

“In the past several years,” Kazue Yoshikawa explains, “I have focused myself on the tension between geometric and organic forms on different horizons of expression.” This complicated sounding statement has its simple origin in the tradition of Japanese aesthetics, which I have confronted with recent European painting and its influences on myself.

 

Kazue Yoshikawa is drawn to contrast, which she believes to be at the heart of all painting, something that is valid both for the art of her native land and European visual conceptions until today. In her work we see incessant change between line and color, base and pattern, small-sized and large-dimensioned formations. Daringly she evokes the decorative and its danger of uniformity, at the same time searching for perfection within the imperfect. Seemingly unconnected pictures and signs are presented, forming something new in their unity.

 

The important American architect Frank Lloyd Wright found ‘organic integrity’ in the assembly of multiple ways of expression, representing the constitution of beauty which he believed was nowhere as perfectly brought to life as in Japanese art. His most famous work, the Guggenheim Museum of Art, is built in this flexible spirit, a synthesis of imagination searching for a phantastic reality of life and a geometry so elemental that any further reduction is impossible.

 

Creating suspense between geometrical and organic forms, Kazue Yoshikawa is pursuing a similar objective. In her choice of motif and complex fusion of graphical and painted elements, she moves into the vicinity of another American architect, Frank O. Gehry, a deconstructivist who, like Yoshikawa, became preoccupied with décor in the nineties and created the Guggenheim Bilbao as a huge opening flower.

 

Kazue Yoshikawa developed her artistic identity in the seventies, a time when young artists across the world engaged in conceptual trends closer to the exposé than to the final realization. In them, the sharp conflict between the ‘empire of abstraction’ and the figurative, which emerged after the Second World War, ceased to exist. Their interest no longer focused on the Freudian unconscious and a global language of Significant Form, as was dominant in French Art Informel and American Abstract Expressionism. The issue of measuring the character of reality within the pictured motif, the difference between picture and image within the world of modern media, a main theme of Pop Art, lost its provocative and innovative character. The postulate of Jean-François Lyotard to “make visible the existence of things that can be imagined, but not seen or made visible” was of importance in the seventies.

 

This new perspective resulted in a surprising outcome for many of us – Neo-Expressionism experienced a renaissance in the eighties in Europe and the USA. Conceptualized deep reflection of herself and fierce slashes with the brush powered the imagery of Kazue Yoshikawa, with the East Asian tradition of painting that was as abstract as it was figurative and its diversity of meaning creating an ideal bridge between the artist’s Japanese origin and new European setting.

 

Based on this groundwork, Kazue Yoshikawa succeeds in walking on the border between autonomous gesture and decorative systems, between the ‘noble’ and the ‘practical’ with supreme confidence and originality. Her art is up to date in questioning art as a sensual event with the highest insistence and at the same time shaking up the ingrained opinions of her audience, who still view ornament in modern art as sacrilegious (Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime”).

 

Among the paintings of recent years, which all show a noticeably traditional attitude, there is one large formatted painting showing strong red and black silhouettes of flowers, which appear – along with the golden ground – as coated in a lacquer-like shiny varnish. Even without a study of Japanese art, its closeness to folding screens painted in gold leaf, ink and color on paper, best represented by the Kano School of the 16^th and 17^th century, leap to mind.

 

However, to understand her decors as mere paraphrase of old models would misunderstand Kazue Yoshikawa. Her radically different mindset not only speaks from her expressionist brushstrokes but also from her conceptual application of form and color. The picture that appears most Japanese is firstly a composition in gold, black and red. It is equally intuitive as structural. The attitude of the artist resembles that of her contemporary, Gerhard Richter, who around the same period created his composition Schwarz-Rot-Gold (“Black-Red-Gold”) consisting of three monochrome surfaces, placed as high upright rectangles on top of each other for the entrance of the rebuilt Reichstags Building in Berlin, which houses the German parliament. Richter’s triptych is a painting that has been made by intellect, as is the case with Kazue Yoshikawa, and thus always a reflection on the possibilities of painting. These are attempts to approach tradition, in the case of Richter the constructivist-geometrical heritage of the twentieth century, but the models remain for both artists witnesses of the persistence they muster for painting; both do not create pictures after the often-conjured ‘last picture’, but pre-pictures of still unfathomed possibilities within painting. Ernst Bloch probably would have used the word Vorschein – ‘anticipatory illumination’ – thereby attesting a utopian quality to the artistic purposes of Richter and Kazue Yoshikawa.

 

*

 

 

 

　1996　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　MATSUI Midori / Art Critic

 

The difficulty in creating originality in two-dimensional works came about by the modernist theory that holds the formative autonomy of artwork is the artistic norm.  In the post war modern art, it can be said that the continuation and further development of those concepts were necessary conditions for “art” to be recognized as art.

The frequent uses of photos and performances, as well as the application of the cartoon-like drawing and handicraft elements actively taken by gay people and feminists in conceptual art at the end of 1960s in the U.S.A., are the very attempts to liberate artistic expression from the fetishism of “formality” by way of expanding the areas of expression by supportive utilization of those elements that had formerly been regarded as being “outside” of the conventional art until that time.

The current works of Yoshikawa Kazue, who had continued with the similar attempts through the 1970s in Germany, can be regarded as being meant to deconstruct the institutionalized artistic expressions in the long-privileged domain called two-dimensional work. Her appropriation of embroidery motifs and stiches which have been marginalized as “handicrafts” reminds us of the flexible feminism of Laurie Simmons who had often employed small dolls in her early works. Traditionally, in embroidery design, there were “patterns” which have been preserved as representations of the fundamental feelings of human beings and stylized through repetitive use in local cultures amidst the long flow of time, much like folklore is   passed on from generation to generation. Yoshikawa suggests, in her works, the actuality which should exist beyond institutionalized art, by skimming up something like a tail of the truth from kitsch-like things. The impasto imitating embroidery stiches on canvas burlesques the brush strokes of abstract expressionists, while at once denying illusions in figurative expression copying “nature.” Her works, which are customarily different from both abstract and figurative expressions in the use of those secondary images, remind us of Pop Art.

Although Yoshikawa does not utilize any charismatic cultural icons, her works unconsciously evoke symbolic power found in imagery, just like in Pop Art. When the light and nimble cartoon-like drawing of her serial work of ice creams resembling the shape of mushroom clouds painted in gray colors on a black background conjure up atomic bombs or breeding bacteria, it suggests the dark side of materialistic culture like the negativity of Pop.

 

 

１９９５                                                                                                              Tatsumi Shinoda

  Paradoxical Flowers and Pineapples                                                            Art Critic / Assistant Professor, Tokyo University of Art and Design

 

  The main part of exhibition of three large paintings. One is an oblong work with ablue Background to which many black brushstrokes have been added from the sides. The process through which the artist created the work by moving around a canvas spread out on the floor is apparent in the pattern itself. Around the perimeter, where yellow is mixed in the gaps between the black, the pattern is dense, but in the centralarea it is sparse. The red hearts enclosed in black shapes like opened scissors constitute the visual focal point of the work.

  The blue is quite intense, and different from the deep blue of the limpid sky at dawn or a shard of Samarkand. It is an anti-natural blue. In the

age of Velazquez, ultramarine blue was a sacred color priced higher than gold, but the ultramarine blue used by Yoshikawa is that of Yves Klein. It is thus a new blue, the same as the Prussian blue whose use become common from the nineteenth century onwards. Making the purity of blue the background of the work, Yoshikawa sets against it a certain feeling of mundaneness.The types of yellow and red used are chosen to provide a worldly challenge to pristineblue. The painting therefore challenge the concept of the pure picture and, conversely,the artist attempts to make purity the painting’s theme of reference.

  In the second work, the surface is covered with black. Butt this black has a life of ist own, turning the whole painting into one great swirl of movement. The kind of speed at which not light but heavv obiect are slowly moved along stubbornly remains on the surface and gloss of the brushstrokes and the thick feeling of the texture. Flower-like shapes are painted in a dark green in sympathy with the black. These are worldly symbols deliberately included to prevent the movement of the black from being associated, for instance, with woods or storms (resulting in only the woods or storms being seen). In other words, it is a device whereby worldliness or decorativeness bring into relief the painting sa a painting.

  The third painting, perhaps the most interesting of the three, is a quite unique square Work. Against a black background, a yellow line repeats patterns resembling drawings Mede with a single, unbroken line, or a map depicting elaborate topographies. On this map, there are altogether seven rows of six pink and round islands positioned at regul-ar intervals. The pink islands are shaped like flowers and the red ones like pineapples. The patterns made by the yellow lines are like the jagged contours of leaves around flowers . This regular repetition seems to bring the contrast of the brilliant color and the startling decorative pattern into Stepp with the forward march of the painting ‘s wi-ll. At the same time, this will is vernacularized, or materialized, by the flowers, pineapples and leaves. Through this worldliness, the artist make the paradoxical attempt to allude to the pure abstractness og the concept of painting.

  All three of these paintings appeal to the eye with equalforce; they are equally stub Born and persistent. Like the various internal elements of the paintings, the black, yelLow, red and pink, through a certain intuition , are drawn so as to create antagonism Between quantity and from. Yet above all, the distinctive feature of these works lies in This stubbornness and persistence clothed in the refinement and delicacy of feminine

Sensitivity.

  One can see that these works are based on the “everydayness“ of the artist’s life. In This everydayness, there is repetition and mundaneness . There is also the everydayness of creation underpinned by the desire to express the universality of the world in the intensity of the painting’s events. This should not be confused with individual emotions. The strange tears in the surface of our everyday consciousness, which give us a

glimpse of chaos through reptition, bring into relief the density of the black background(the depth of chaos) and the light within it through the process of being sewn together by mundane, repetitive patterns. These works therefore seem in tune with our difficulty of attaining awareness of the contemporary world. Indeed, one might even say that it ist his very difficulty that gives meaning to the act of bringing paintings (art) into

the world through their intensity.

  From the srt historical standpoint, it may be relevant that Yoshikawa lived in Germany for a long period, for her work has expressionist characteristics. These descend from the expressionist line that was globally revived and reappraised through new expressio-nist painting from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. At the same time, the influence of minimalism from the 1960s can also be detected in her use of repeated patterns. Thus the objectivity of minimalism and the subjectivity of expressionism are intermingled in Yoshikawa’s paintings. However, there are also signs that she has added her own interpretation to the mixture of chaotic elements with mundane everydayness and decorativeness that has been one of the distinctive characteristics of figurative expression in the West since the end of the 1980s. Althrough I feel somewhat hesitant about pointing out the traditionally Japanese elements of glatness and decorativeness, I cannot help feeling when I look at Yoshikawa’s paintings that these elements represent the “rite of passage“of the artist living overseas.who has to merge everyday through with artistic consepts. Nevertheless, this decorativeness and mundaneness, like the antagonism between the Various internal elements, maintain a precarious balance with painting as a whole. The Attraction of Yshikawa ‘s works lies in this very precariousness and in the paradoxical allusion to the purity of painting.

 

 

 

 

1984         Kazue Yoshikawa  über ihre Arbeit                                                                            HFBK Präsident Carl Vogel

 

 

 

Zwischen europäische Kultur und asiatischem Denken, Fühlen und Handeln gestellt, musste ich meine eigene künstlerische Identität entwickeln, im Sog einer aktuellen Strömung, die für das Gefühl und gegen die jüngere kunstgeschichtliche Tradition angetreten ist.

 

 Die japanische Ästhetik lebt aus den Gegenständen heraus, aus der Spannung zwischen Geometrischem und Organischem, zwischen Ordnung und Zufall, zwischen individueller Identität und dem Eingebundensein in die Natur.

 

Vollkommene Unvollkommenheit gilt als höchstes Ziel.

 

 Ich suche in meine Arbeit nach den Grundempfindungen europäischer wie asiatischer Kultur und natürlich auch nach gewissermaßen übergreifenden Handlungsweisen oder nach Zeichen von vergleichbarer Wertigkeit.

 

 Bezogen auf das Material, auf Form und Inhalt beschreibe ich den Grenzbereich der Beliebigkeit des persönlichen Gefühls und Formwillens eines Individuums. Zwischen Abstraktion und Einfühlung entsteht Spannung, ästhetisch wie inhaltlich, entsteht Offenheit in Fühlen und Denken.

 

 Ein basaler Bestand nicht korrumpierter Gefühle ist Ausdruck und Inbegriff eines Individuums in seinem in Natur und Umwelt eingebundenen Bestand. Entsprechend einem psychischen Grundbedürfnis des Menschen brauchen wir einen solchen.

 

 Es bedeutet dies ein Mehr gegenüber Zweckdasein und Ein-Funktionalität. Nicht das identifizierbare, das Eindeutige interessiert, sondern die Welt hinter den Dingen. In den Kulturen der industrialisierten Nationen ist das Ursprüngliche, das Einfache in seiner Vielschichtigkeit verlorengegangen.

 

 Direktheit der Wahrnehmung resultiert in Spontaneität, Meditation und Aktion fallen zusammen. So kann das Einfache die Neugierde wecken, kann Phantasie entwickeln, indem es auf die Welt dahinter verweist.

 

 Ich möchte konkret arbeiten, um mich bedeutungsschweren Inhalten fernzuhalten, die oft künstlerische Arbeit bestimmen. Durch die scheinbare Oberflächlichkeit solcher Strukturen hindurch wird Tiefe bloßgelegt.

 

Die Strukturen bleiben konkret in ihrem Erscheinungsbild und so verweisen sie allein auf das Individuum selbst.

 

Die Grenze zwischen bloßer Dekoration und Kunst versuche ich durch die künstlerische Verwendung dekorativer Elemente zu beschreiben. Muster, Ornament, Dekor werden aus ihrer Funktion, aus ihrem Umfeld gelöst, werden freigesetzt als Zeichen der sich spielerisch bewegenden Phantasie.

 

Meine Arbeiten können weitergedacht werden. Das Zusammensetzen verschiedenartiger Formate kann auch las ein Weglassen verstanden werden.

 

 Meine raumbezogenen Arbeiten wollen eher ihrerseits den Raum in eine Arbeit miteinbeziehen als umgekehrt, ihn selbst durch die Arbeit verändern. So bleiben die Arbeiten als solche zweidimensional, auch wenn sie räumlich angeordnet sind. Gefühl allein bestimmt die veränderte Wahrnehmung.

 

Meine Arbeiten sollen zum Bleiben auffordern.

 

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　*nach ihren eigenen Angaben notiert von Carl Vogel