Shifting Borders

ADELE SCHLOMBS

tHE ExHIBItIOn’S AMBItIOnS

Did you know that field hares have no fears? They are known as masters of eroticism, but not as strategists. (…) They spring joyfully here and there, always changing directions. They spring from border to border And break the established linear system.

This exhibition and catalogue are the fruit of a dialogue spanning many years that seeks to scrutinise the borderlines between Western and Oriental art, and between ancient and modern art. As her work reveals, Leiko Ikemura persistently cuts across borders. Her art, uniquely redefining the boundaries between Japanese and Western styles, also redraws the demarcation lines between art from earlier periods and contemporary work.

As recently as twenty-five years ago it would have been virtually inconceivable to devote a major monographic exhibition to Leiko Ikemura’s oeuvre in the Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst (Museum of East Asian Art). At most it might have been possible to stage one of the frequent “interventions” that aimed to shed new interpretative light on ancient Chinese and Japanese masterpieces from the perspective of contemporary artists, handing over the museum’s interpretative authority to the artist for a limited period. Conversely, Leiko Ikemura would have found it inappropriate or even preposterous to decide, just because she was born in Japan, to adopt an ethnographic framing and show her work in the Museum of East Asian Art, for she has consistently positioned herself as an international artist since the beginning of her career. Audiences and art critics might well have misunderstood that kind of show and sidelined her by mystifying her as a “traditionalist from the land of the rising sun”.

How has our gaze changed since then? Which borders have shifted and how can we set the boundary markers anew in order to enter into a balanced dialogue? What common denominator can we find for a cooperation between the Museum of East Asian Art and Leiko Ikemura? These and other similar questions are the springboard from which this project was launched.

JuxtApOSItIOnS

Thirteen ancient Chinese and Japanese artworks were handpicked to be set in juxtaposition to and invite comparisons with Leiko Ikemura’s work. They define the context in which Ikemura’s art is shown and determine the themes that structure the exhibition and the catalogue in a loosely structured sequence. “Transfigurations – Evolution” is the only chapter organised chronologically, as it presents the turning point in the 1980s and 1990s when Ikemura completed the transition from narrative depiction to succinct, sculptural forms.

Quotations from classical Chinese and Japanese literature conjure up clusters of asso ciations around the thematic focuses: “Mindscapes – The Cosmic Landscape”; “Meditation – Looking Within”; “Houses and Hollows – Vessels of Shadow”; “Black, White, Grey – Substance and Emptiness”; “Memento Mori – Impermanence”. Leiko Ikemura has also written texts specifically for the chapters “Transfigurations – Evolution” and “All About Girls – Floating, Standing, Lying”. In composing haiku and tanka as a painter and sculptor, she picks up on the Japanese tradition of scholar-artists who strove, in keeping with the Chinese ideal, to combine poetry and painting.

MInDSCApES — tHE COSMIC LAnDSCApE

In Japan in particular, the landscape as lyrical metaphor gave expression to human emotions such as love, yearning and sorrow through poetic images of nature in the four seasons. The seasonal cycle of coming into being, blossoming and fading away played a prominent role in painting in the Japanese style (wayo -). This is exemplified in the early seventeenth-century screen Birds and Flowers in Autumn and Winter (Fig. 2, p. 20). Hibiscus blossoms and red maple leaves point to the coming cold season, while the wild geese calling out to their fellows traversing the skies express the longing for intimacy and security.

In contrast, monochrome ink landscapes in the Chinese style (kanyo -), which entered Japan along with Zen Buddhism, embodied the cosmic universe. It is represented here by a fan painting (Fig. 1, p. 18) by Kenko - Sho -kei (ca. 1478–1506), a contemporary of the famed To yo - Sesshu - (1420–1506). Humankind was only one small part of the all-

penetrating vital life force (C. qi; J. ki), and of the dualistic universe governed by the yin-yang principle. Interestingly, in landscape painting the human body was projected to a macrocosmic level, with rivers and lakes interpreted as arteries and veins, and mountains and cliffs as the bones of the universe, striving, in the process of constant change, to achieve balance and equilibrium. The human figure, always represented in a concise, sketchy form, was embedded in the macrocosm but did not assume any kind of superordinate role within it. Invoking the forces of the cosmos, humans could however assert their aspirations to intellectual autonomy and individual freedom. This is revealed with exemplary clarity in the painting Two Men Conversing Beneath a Cliff (p. 62). The viewer gazes down from a bird’s eye perspective on diagonal cliffs that cut dramatically across the image, along with gnarled pines, and two scholars in the guise of fishermen seated beneath them, deep in conversation. The trope of the fisherman with his close ties to nature symbolises intellectual independence and withdrawal from the “red dust” of public office. The left-hand side of the painting remains empty, representing water, with a far shore rendered in wet-on-wet ink wash opening up onto a vista in the hazy distance.

The compositions of Leiko Ikemura’s Antalya, Colonia or Genesis II and III paintings from 2012 to 2014 (pp. 51–57) are akin to those found in Chinese landscape works, if we leave the light-hued paint applied as a wash aside for a moment. Mountains, water, wisps of haze and mist are portrayed from a bird’s eye perspective and overlaid one upon another as flat planes to evoke a sense of space. They form their own universe, with a sketchily evoked, introverted figure of a girl, which can be read as representing Ikemura, set as a point of reference in the left foreground in two of the Antalya paintings. The girls form an integral part of this universe, distinguished neither chromatically nor formally from the landscape elements. In Colonia the figure of a reclining woman, viewed from behind, flows into a tree, its red leaves fluttering in the wind as it tilts to the left, serving as a bracketing repoussoir device, drawing the viewer into the composition of colour planes. Just as cosmic landscapes in the Chinese style evoke a mindscape rather than depicting a topographic locus, Ikemura’s landscapes do not portray specific places. Instead titles such as Colonia, Antalya, and Genesis II and III refer to the artist’s spiritual and emotional landscapes.

In Leiko Ikemura’s sculptural work, mountains, trees and organically shaped pillars play an important role, evoking the cosmic mountain and axis mundi. Fuji-Animals (p. 45), for example, refers, as the title suggests, to Japan’s most sacred mountain, the awe-inspiring Fujisan. Closer inspection reveals the faces of animals and humans, appearing like mythical beings or spirits in the terracotta sculpture’s rugged surfaces. This sparks comparisons with a first-century copper-green glazed Chinese covered jar (p. 46), symbolising the Daoist islands of paradise. In this idyll, visualised as a mountainous isle, wild animals such as tigers and lions stroll among the clouds along with winged Daoist immortals. Vessels such as these served in the context of burials as

an axis mundi promising happiness and eternal life. This interpretation could also be transposed to the slim bronze columns (pp. 6 f., 14 f., 41) in Ikemura’s work. A world axis jutting sharply upwards, they mark a cosmic positioning. In a further example, the bare bones of two stylised trees, intricately intertwined, are a metaphor for love in Tree Love (p. 44).

The Chinese conception of the cosmically ordered universe also included animals such as the tiger and the dragon, symbolising West and East, as well as the elements of wind and water. In the imposing pair of dragon and tiger screens (pp. 58 f.) ascribed to Tosa Mitsutsugu (active ca. 1624–44), the primal forces of wind and rain are expressed indirectly in minimalist landscape elements such as bamboo in the wind and crashing waves on a rocky shore. The centre of the composition is dominated by an energy-full emptiness. In Ikemura’s painting Fu (p. 65) a lion emerges on the left-hand side from the black and grey wash areas that have spread like a forbidding cloud against the backdrop of a luminous, glowing blue panorama.

MEDItAtIOn — LOOkIng wItHIn

The titles of many of Leiko Ikemura’s sculptural works refer to Buddhism. The monumental bronze of the Usagi Kannon (pp. 69 f.) is one clear example, a project that Ikemura tackled between 2012 and 2014 after the To -hoku earthquake and the catastrophic tsunami in 2011. The Bodhisattva Kannon (literally “Regarder of the World’s Cries”) is one of the figures that accompany the Amida Buddha, who dwells in the “Pure Land of the West” (jo -do), the paradise that lies in the west. Having attained enlightenment as a bodhisattva, he chose not to enter nirvana, for he wished to help others on the path to enlightenment. Usagi (rabbit) can signify the rabbit as an animal and as a sign of the zodiac (p. 136), but usagi can also refer to the “cute girl” (usagi-chan) in anime films and mangas. What kind of bodhisattva is this, with a sad, empathetic child’s face, one rabbit ear pricked up, the other flopping downwards, granting refuge in the cavern of his broad skirt? Buddhism teaches that Buddha-nature, and hence the potential for enlightenment, is intrinsic to all sentient beings. So it follows that this must also apply to the modern art character of the “cute girl”. Perhaps this offers the key to the hallmark paradox of this monumental bodhisattva, offering sympathy and protection, with his innocent childlike countenance and pendulous rabbit’s ear.

In the bronze sculpture Bust (p. 75) from 1998–9, the viewer is confronted with a torso made up of a square body that widens slightly at the base. The sweeping silhouette is the only eye-catching aspect of this silent bust. Although the rough matt surface is not forbidding, it does not disclose anything either, instead referencing the inward gaze, which leads to the resolution of contradictions, to “suchness” and to absolute nothingness. This also applies to the bronze sculpture Ohne Gesicht (Faceless, p. 81), which presents a

round head with comically protruding ears, where the eye encounters an impenetrable boundary and the gaze is reflected inward. In the twelfth-century wooden sculpture of a meditating monk (p. 82), whose traits express profound humanity and intense concentration, an aura of inner coherence is conveyed by the rhythmic lines of the folds. At the same time the sculpture casts viewers back upon themselves, for each of us can only find our true self within, not in the outside world. Ikemura’s heads and busts display a similar shuttered secrecy, some holding their eyes, mouth and ears closed with their many arms, as if seeking to direct their concentration inward.

HOuSES AnD HOLLOwS — VESSELS Of SHADOw

In China, dramatic hollowed-out cliffs and caverns have been valued since ancient times, not merely as condensations of cosmic forces that have come into being over many millennia, but also because it was believed that hugely potent cosmic energies (C. qi, J. ki) could gather in their cracks, recesses and in openings to their interior. In the Daoist spirit, it is the organic interplay of immaterial and solid substance, of light and shadow, of yin and yang, that renders these natural phenomena so significant.

Tanizaki’s famous essay “In Praise of Shadows” offers a striking account of the vital importance of shadows for Japanese aesthetics. Domestic architecture in Japan is designed to ensure that any light that penetrates into the interior is subtly modulated or enters only through small openings and cracks under low eaves. The Japanese house is made up of layers of shadows; undefined, chromatically indeterminate, indeed devoid of colour and exuding a mysterious stillness and calm.

The house models created by Leiko Ikemura (pp. 96–103) resemble caverns, towers, shrines or vessels of shadow. Their sparse openings heighten the impression that they are hermetically sealed. A comparable aura exudes from the second-century Japanese ritual bell Do -taku (p. 92). Its bronze surfaces are adorned with a symmetrical decor of relief lines, with just two rectangular openings on the lower rim, and two small eyes beneath the shoulder allowing a scant amount of light to penetrate into the bell.

The late-Neolithic ritual vessel (p. 220) with a tapered waist and a wide three-dimensional openwork rim triggers comparisons with the headless sculptures of girls, such as Stehende mit weißem Kleid (Standing with White Dress, 1995, p. 232) and Sitzende mit weißem Kleid (Sitting with White Dress, 1995, p. 78) or Stehende (Standing, 1997, p. 199) and Lying (1997, pp. 238 ff.). Their necks are shaped to form open maws. As vessels of shadow, they suggest caves in which emptiness accumulates, or de-individualised husks.

BLACk, wHItE, grEy — SuBStAnCE AnD EMptInESS

The hallmark of the drawings, watercolours and chemigrams from the 1980s and 1990s is their vigorous, fluid calligraphic rhythm, in which visual perception is transposed directly into the tension of the line. Some works even contain references to writing, such as the two drawings in which Ikemura creates a visual transposition of her name as a small settlement by a lake (ike = lake, mura = village), captioning the lake with the ideogram ike, while the village is suggested by the houses or by the character for mountain, behind which the village might be concealed (p. 297). The rhythm of the watercolours, composed of just a few brushstrokes, (pp. 152–157) is also closely related to calligraphy. Often they include drops of paint that have flowed into one another while still wet and “ink lakes” created by drops of water applied subsequently, highlighting the momentum of the brushstrokes. This technique of efflorescences produced by applying further layers of paint while the underlying layers are still wet (tarashikomi) has a long tradition in Japan and was deployed to striking effect for example by artists of the Rimpa School to portray moss on tree bark. In the chemigrams Ikemura worked, so to speak, without a compass; in other words, she relied on the unmediated interaction of mind and hand in deploying the fixer in the dark room. This gives rise to spontaneous, gestural images, in which the painterly movement often begins outside the pictorial space or extends beyond the edge of the image (pp. 169–175). In these works, made up of broad intermingling black and grey brushstrokes set against a white ground, individual motifs such as heads and black creatures well up into the foreground, a cabinet of horrors replete with spirits residing in the twilight zone of black, white and grey. Ikemura writes:

Day and night are conditions of light But twilight makes me conscious of the reality hidden beneath the surface. Things slowly lose their function and begin simply to exist.

As twilight frees objects from their mantle, shadows liberate things from themselves. In her photographs of shadows (pp. 160–167), Ikemura shows only the shadows cast by bottles and vessels, by women’s long hair – as if these shady forms could represent another, secret existence of things. However, what the shadows in Ikemura’s photos really make visible is the grey, the substance of the void, the positive nothingness that adheres to all objects below the surface.

In his single-character images, Inoue Yu -ichi, the grandmaster of twentieth-century Japanese calligraphy (Fig. 3, p. 24), discovered the potential of “frozen ink” that had stood for some time after mixing. The emblematic ideogram aruku (p. 178) is written with a large brush; the black grainy particles separate out from the water in the stale ink,

generating a black-grey-white striated effect that reveals the delicate, plastic dynamics of the brush’s movements with striking impact. What is substance here and what is emptiness? The black component in Inoue’s brushstrokes could be read as stemming from the material world, with the grey and white chinks signifying the void. Yet it could also be exactly the other way around.

MEMEntO MOrI — IMpErMAnEnCE

The Pacific War, in which Japan took up arms against China and the USA and paid for its aggressive Imperialist politics with total defeat, counts among the major traumas of the twentieth century, alongside Nazi Germany’s warmongering. Its consequences still impinge on present day Japan. The post-war generation was deeply shaken by this issue, and by the associated questioning of authoritarian patriarchal power structures that even filter through into gender relations, all of which drove Leiko Ikemura to inner emigration when she was in her early twenties.

Ikemura took historic photographs as the basis for her engagement with the Pacific War in her series Marine 63, Marine 68, Marine 69, Marine 83 (2006), as well as in Pacific Ocean (2005–6) and Ocean (2007, pp. 187–193). The horror of these images, with their restricted grey and black-blue colour palette, stems from their sober distance. The destructive events unfold on a remote nocturnal horizon: war ships, tracer bullets, grenades, fire from anti-aircraft guns, and kamikaze pilots plummeting earthward. Rather than narrating the suffering and death caused by the war, these images convey the speechlessness of a generation born after these events. In his haiku “Summer Grass”, the great poet Matsuo Basho - gave expression to the anguish of such futility with unparalleled acuity:

Summer grass! All that remains Of warriors’ dreams

As memento mori, Ikemura’s war pictures express the actual horror of death and impermanence by soberly parading their banality. Island (p. 195) alludes to the SinoJapanese conflict concerning the Senkaku Islands and depicts idyllic green islands against a red background. Above them, a horizon line divides the image, with a black cloud of smoke rising in the centre of the picture against a black ground, like an evil premonition of war.

Contrasting with Ikemura’s war paintings, Hokusai’s masterful depiction of two severed heads in the reeds confronts the viewer with a close-up view of a nature morte in the literal sense of the term (p. 183). As if in a still life, the grotesquely distorted heads of the

deceased – were they bandits or heroes? – are set on a rope draped around the wilting reeds. However, this distanced, aestheticising gaze does not dilute in the slightest the fundamental horror intrinsic to the macabre banality of violent death and impermanence.

ALL ABOut gIrLS — fLOAtIng, StAnDIng, LyIng

An engagement with gender issues and the postulate of a specifically female identity are leitmotifs that permeate Ikemura’s oeuvre. She homes in again and again on the question of female identity, whether we think of the cosmic landscapes with women or girls as points of reference, or the incisive drawings and narrative paintings from the 1980s dominated by vengeful female figures, or the depictions of girls floating in front of a black ground, or indeed the sculptures of standing or reclining women. Ikemura coined the exhibition title “All About Girls and Tigers” herself. What is this focus on tigers? Do they perhaps signify male predatory behaviour? That seems improbable; the emphasis is more likely on how the tiger’s lissom agility and seismographic clairvoyance is manifested in the adult woman.

The fifteenth-century portrait of Reishojo (p. 202) portrays the torso of a girl, apparently entirely self-contained, set against an abstract, blank background. The relaxed drapery lines of her clothing and sleeves, highlighted in white, lead on to the delicate pale hands folded in front of her stomach, closing the circle. The face, shown in three-quarters profile, is white like a mask and the sober acuity of the eyes entrances the viewer. Reishojo , the daughter of a lay Buddhist who sunk all his worldly possessions in a river, seems to be aware of the tiger within her and to have crossed the threshold to being at one with herself. Not a hint of indeterminacy or ambiguity remains in her image.

In Zen Buddhist painting, the floating state always marks a dramatic inner turning point, renunciation or reversal, the transition from one existence to another. Examples include depictions of the Buddha Shakyamuni returning from the mountains or Bodhidharma, founder of the Chan (J. Zen) School crossing the Yangzi River (Fig. 4, p. 27). In the famous work by the priest Chuan Shinko (p. 209), this state of floating is characterised by a descending movement, with no solid ground or other spatial reference points. Buddha realised that ascetic exercises that lead to death are pointless, and left the mountain wilderness to meditate, thus attaining enlightenment. Bodhidharma, having become aware that it was pointless to seek to convince the ruler of the Liang dynasty about Zen Buddhism, crossed the Yangzi River on a reed, subsequently reaching enlightenment after meditating for nine years in the Shaolin monastery. In both images the floating figure is sketched out with generous brushstrokes, the ink sunken deeply into the paper. Only the wind blowing in the garments references the interior motion. Yet the inner space of the figures remains void, because it cannot be captured in words or images.

Sketchily evoked, blurred figures of women and girls appear against a neutral abstract background in black or luminous colours in Ikemura’s portrayals of floating girls, with examples including the watercolour on the catalogue cover (p. 152), or Landung (Landing, p. 204), and In den Horizont (Into the Horizon, 1989/1999, p. 205), as well as her painting Schreitende (Pacing, 2007, p. 201). At most, a sense of spatial positioning is suggested by glistening horizon lines in the foreground or middle distance. With truncated legs, arms or heads, the walking and diving female figures float against the painting surface. They seem absent-minded, focused on themselves as if sleep-walking, striving towards some unspecified inner insight. Ikemura writes:

The horizon, this magnificent line of illumination, is illusion of something beyond the other part of me, such an expectation of otherness. Even though space continues there are yet lines in our visual life. As a child I thought I can touch the horizon, I can go beyond it, but this was always far away. Maybe in the darkness we are not cut off by it but surrounded by the band of light. (…) So the black is the otherness we sleep into every night. In the black of nothing there is no distance. We pass through the horizon without knowing.

In contrast, the depictions of reclining figures in Face in Blue, Face in Red, Floating Face (2008–9, pp. 212 f., 217) seem at peace with themselves in slumber, resonating with the axiom, “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” They have apparently crossed the border of the glimmering horizon in their sleep and completed the transition to the world of unconscious being.

tŌkAIDŌ — frOM tHE 53 StAtIOnS Of tHE EAStErn SEA rOAD

Hiroshige’s famous woodcut series, 53 Stations of the Eastern Sea Road, is one of the most emblematic works of Japanese art that inspired and revolutionised Western painting from the second half of the nineteenth century on. The bird’s eye perspective, two-dimensional compositions, cropped or lattice-covered pictorial spaces and audacious angles, luminous colours and unusual chromatic juxtapositions served as an unparalleled source of inspiration for European artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Fig. 5, p. 29; p. 290). These works offered artists the tools they needed to break free of the dead-end street of academic tradition, central perspective and spatial illusionism.

In Japan, on the other hand, artists had begun to engage with European modes of representation at a much earlier stage, addressing spatial perspective and the plastic portrayal of three-dimensional objects, and discovering how to handle oil paints, which

gave rise to the emergence of Western-style painting (yo ga). This became established in the Meiji period parallel to painting created in the Japanese style (nihonga). As these two schools were stylistically incompatible, they developed independently of each other.

In Ikemura’s interpretation of Hiroshige’s Stations of the Eastern Sea Road (pp. 282–287; 292–295), she imbues his famous panoramas with a surprisingly painterly quality. The woodblock prints by Hiroshige are grounded in colour fields, contour lines, and the inner delineations within these (Fig. 5, p. 29; p. 283). Standing in marked contrast to these prints, Ikemura’s drawings in soft pastel chalks seem to transpose Hiroshige’s work into the medium of Western painting.

Säule III (Akanthus), 1990

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