Yasunari Nakagomi – One Person Exhibition (Praxis 2000)

 

 

 

 Some 15 years ago when I was asked about who was the artist of the cover design of my first published single volume of my works, an immediate awareness of Yasunari Nakagomi a unique artist came upon me. At that time, I only knew him for a short time as our wives were high school classmates.  Frankly, I was not aware of the extent and content of his unique artistic works. I had in a biased manner disassociated his body of his personal artistic expression from my perception of distrusting the work of general book cover designers, as a form of true artistic expression. 

 

It seemed to me that book cover designers for business reasons; demonstrate the tendency to choose explanatory art forms to communicate what they are trying to say in words. In viewing the body of his personal works of art, I could not label Yasunari’s art works as pictures as they were far from explanatory, when in essence they asked for responses from the viewers. Magnificent in concept!

 

His arts met my deepest expectations, and in viewing and experiencing were beyond what I expected from him. The expressionist in his art form casts to the viewer questions rather than presenting the answers.

 

The world we live in is full of viewer responses and reactions without evoking questions. Where, almost every artwork or objects of art are constructed by individual form, color and quality and built up to make a wall of the viewer’s visual world, there is no space for questions or doubt. To that world, Yasunari casts questions. 

 

Earlier I did not define his works as pictures because his visual arts are not completed within the constraints of the frame.  His works are part of something more expressive, and further they are sum of many parts, that are probably the intention of opening the road between the barrier of the visual world and the openness of the mind’s imaginative world.  

 

If you pay close attention to his art, you will understand why I feel this way. Focus on the one spot of the canvas, and notice that the area is independent but similar in shape with the whole canvas. When you let your eyes move to view the whole canvas, you will notice the individually viewed elements as complete in themselves.

 

In the world of computer geometry, when it is the diagram that asks it’s owns questions by mirroring it’s self we say it is ‘reflective’.  Concretely, the diagram or numerical integral presented which has a similarity to any part of itself is called a ‘reflective diagram’. In other words, the numerical formula that includes its own questions has to be written round and round in circles and becomes written over and over again as with Yasunari’s works of similar diagrams to be viewed in its entirety.

 

His presented works are, thoroughly hand-made, and superbly reflective in composition.    Maybe, he is attempting to put the whole ‘world’ into the elements of his art ‘work’.  Is it possible?    It is indeed a heroic attempt. If he is truly trying to put the whole world into a portion of the work, then his attitude is that of Don Quixote in Cervantes’s “The Man of La Mancha”, in fighting an imagined enemy to right the wrongs or misperceptions of the world against perceived evil as he charged the imagined mythical beast, a windmill as a knight in armor with his pike or liken to Basho’s famous haiku poem of the frog jumping in the old pond. 

[Haiku Poem Title: Old pond, a frog jumps in, the ‘sound of water’]

 

In brief translation, the real heath of the haiku poem is the Silence of the Old Pond’ emphasized or broken by the ‘Sound of Water’, but I think there is more.   A ripple of concentric circle made by the frog jumping into the pond gave a fatal end to the story’s viewed structure of complete silence as just an old pond stilled in the moment of time.

I mean that through words of action the unchanging Indian ink drawing of the old pond was completely altered or destroyed demonstrated that in the changing view, all is fleeting, ‘all is vanity’.

 

Yasunari’s work is like throwing a frog in our presence or fixed perceived vision which creates confusion and questions in our stilled perceived immediate world of vision.  The frog will dive to the water while trying to go back to the surface, creating action and reaction in its movement by trick or creating constant change to the viewer’s perception.

 

Tatsuya Ishii, a famous Japanese artist,  like me is often irritated with the basic structure of projected word meanings and the perceived logic that follows as in satirical jokes to illustrate what is not always evident.  Satirical jokes become rhetoric terrorism, by slinging verbal arrows at the structure of superficially perceived meanings of the viewer’s world and human logic.  In that sense, Yasunari Nakagomi’s work creates momentary terrorism in our stilled visual world.  Whether he realizes intentionally or not, his works revisit by visual implication the acts of graphic terrorism and reoccurring images again upon the viewer. Is that successful expressionism?   Probably yes in evoking reaction and thoughts.   His body of developing works continues to pose questions to us, however incomplete and unsettled but always self advancing with searching methodology and expressive process.

 

“Carelessness in perception is forbidden”

 

Takashi Odajima

 

“Yasunari Nakagomi – dares to seek his quest of answers to the questions posed within his art works by seeking the impossible of the constantly changing society’s view and perception of truth.”

Roger-McKean Bazeley