The House Beyond the Horizon

DAVID ELLIOtt

HOuSES, DrEAMS AnD pOEMS

“Inside the high garden walls, one came upon the latticed front of the house. An earthen passage led from the entrance through to the rear. In the rooms, lighted even at noon but by a dim light from the courtyard, hemlock pillars rubbed to a fine polish, gave off a soft glow… Sachiko sensed that much of her sisters’ love for Osaka was in fact love for the house… She had often enough joined Yukiko and Taeko in complaining about it—surely there was no darker and more unhygienic house in the world and they felt thoroughly depressed after no more than three days there—and yet a deep indefinable sorrow came over Sachiko at the news. To lose the Osaka house would be to lose her very roots.”

Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters, 1949 1

Leiko Ikemura was born in Tsu, a small Japanese coastal town in Mie Prefecture not far from the ancient building complex of the Ise Grand Shrine (Fig. 1, p. 246). Set against surrounding woods and mountains, these fountainheads of pantheistic Shintoism, torn down and identically rebuilt every twenty years, were not only a national centre of pilgrimage but also, paradoxically, an embodiment of the impermanence of all things in the death and renewal of nature. Although she did not realise it while she was still living in Japan, the beauty and transient spirit of this special place was later to become of lasting significance for the development of Leiko Ikemura’s art.

The town of Tsu itself, however, was much less prepossessing than the famous shrines. It had been heavily bombed during the Second World War but quickly rebuilt. Ikemura’s

1 Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters (1949), Book 1, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker, London, Vintage, 2000, 99.

predominant early memory is of the open horizon and unavoidable view of the ocean. 2 Home life was not happy. She has described a melancholic childhood with a father, unable to settle into a profession, whose inchoate frustration cast a pall over the whole family. At High School she was a good, if at times rebellious, student and literature became her solace.

Precociously, she read both European and Japanese authors and became acquainted with haiku, a traditional unrhymed, seasonal poem, each of its three lines usually containing five, seven and five syllables.3 These concise, abstract word pictures were her introduction to a new way of looking at the world that enabled her to come to terms with the different worlds she was later to encounter. At the beginning of the 1980s, when she first started to work independently as an artist, free form poems and haiku accompanied many of her works. 4

Her hometown was isolated from the big cities, museums were far away, and she had little exposure to visual art. Her maternal grandfather, a master builder, was a strong inflence; he showed her illustrated books about art and she began to take an interest in drawing. The house not only became a repeated image in her drawings but also an obsession, a double-edged motif of both security and anxiety that constantly resurfaces in her work:

“The ‘house’ is an obsession that has stayed with me since I was a child. I often dreamt of houses and stretches of water and I made notes of them. Some are fascinatingly lucid, others more traumatic… Why this is so deeply embedded in me is that even as a child I wanted to build houses and this is probably to do with experience of our house being destroyed by a typhoon… The house is a living organism. The most amazing part for me was the cellar… Every house [in Tsu] had a place like this, dark and damp. ”5

On Sundays she attended school in a simple Protestant church and, although she would never describe herself as Christian, remembers this place fondly as a kind of “home” or refuge at a time when “people had little energy to be religious. I hardly knew what it was like to be in a community until I went to church (…) I was able to connect with people [there] in a way [it was] not possible with my family. ” 6

Like many members of the generation of 1968, not only in Japan, she clearly remembers early feelings of alienation, sadness, anger and fragmentation. As part of this she cast a critical eye on the subservient role of women in Japanese society, particularly on the life of her mother and her relationship with her father, and this made her decide to get away. The pitiless descriptions of existence and free will in such seminal novels as Albert Camus’s L’Etranger (The Stranger, 1942), Jean Paul Sartre’s trilogy Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Roads to Freedom, 1945–49) or the ground-breaking analysis of the war between the sexes in Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex, 1949), struck chords with Ikemura’s own experience and convinced her that she had to take responsibility for her own life to break from her past. This became a repeated pattern in her artistic development as she searched for new ways of working. “For a variety of

reasons, the first chapter of my life was (…) cut off. Things are perhaps different for most people, people who live a continuous life. In my life there has been a series of radical breaks, it was as though I wanted to acquire a new identity each time. ” 7

In 1970, at the age of eighteen, she left home to study Spanish Literature and Linguistics at the University of Foreign Studies in Osaka. In 1972 she was in Tokyo, working parttime for six months at the Cuban Embassy. By the time she was twenty-one, she had left Japan, initially to study Spanish at summer schools in the universities of Salamanca and Grenada, little realising that she would not return home for seven years and would not settle back to live there.

Ikemura has spoken about her need to move away “from the strictness of Japanese tradition” at this time by giving the example of “‘comrades’ of my sex [who] have done so before.” Undoubtedly she was thinking of such artists as Yayoi Kusama and Yoko Ono who had both left Japan in the 1950s.8 Ikemura, however, came from a very different background and was younger than either of them when she decided to leave. Perhaps because of this, her decision to move away was less premeditated but her desire for freedom and her determination to establish herself were equally strong. 9

2 Leiko Ikemura, Leiko Ikemura, Arnsberg, Sauerland-Museum, 2010, 143. 3 The European writers Ikemura remembers reading at this time include Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, André Gide, Søren Kirkegaard, Frederico Garcia Lorca, Antonio Machado, Carston McCullers, Friedrich Nietzsche, William Shakespeare, and Leo Tolstoy. The Japanese authors she read include Yukio Mishima, Shikibu Murasaki, Natsume So -seki, Kenzaburo - O e, Sei Sho nagon, and Junichiro - Tanizaki. Leiko Ikemura, Leiko Ikemura: Transfiguration, Tokyo, National Museum of Modern Art, 2011, 225–6, and interview with the author, 25 February 2013. 4 In 1985, she made 22 drawings to accompany a new translation of haiku by the 17th century wandering Zen poet Matsuo Basho , Hundertelf Haiku, Zurich, Amman Verlag. Leiko Ikemura: “For me the art of haiku is universally valid, all my drawings are related to this. The character of haiku is poetry in its most concise form, aware of its transience, far from bombast or pretension, Haiku sings the praises of nature and is nature itself. Only by distancing oneself sufficiently from one’s ego, one ought to become, in one’s essence, a part of nature’s creation like in a haiku”, in Leiko Ikemura, Kunsthalle, Recklinghausen, 2004, 17. 5 Leiko Ikemura im Gespräch mit Friedemann Malsch, Cologne, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Kunst Heute 20, 1998, 65–66. Ikemura related her work around the motif of the house to the writings of the French theorist Gaston Bachelard, who in Poetics of Space (1958) regarded an unbuilt or still to be completed house as a conduit for dreams. 6 Leiko Ikemura, Transfiguration, 218. 7 Leiko Ikemura, Leiko Ikemura, Sauerland-Museum, 140. 8 Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) left Japan in 1957 to live and work in the USA where she made her vast “infinity nets”, dot paintings, and iconic installations. When she returned to Tokyo from New York in 1973 after a breakdown, all of her achievements were rejected, and she decided to sequester herself in an open clinic near the studio where she still lives. It was not until the early 1990s that her work began to be widely appreciated within Japan. Yoko Ono (b. 1933) experienced a similar case of rejection. She had moved to New York with her parents in the early 1950s and when she returned to Tokyo in 1963 after the breakdown of her first marriage was hospitalised with clinical depression. She left Japan as soon as she could and since that time has only returned as a visitor. Her reputation as an artist was also established outside Japan. 9 Very few Japanese women artists were able to stay in Japan and make a career from themselves. Atsuko Tanaka (1932–2005), a member of the Gutai group, has only become widely appreciated internationally since her death. In the mid-1950s, Toko Shinoda (b. 1913) broke into the male dominated medium of calligraphy after her work was shown at MoMA, New York, but only achieved recognition as a painter in Japan after a member of the Imperial family purchased a painting. It was during the 1990s that a younger generation of women artists began to emerge in Japan. The Japanese artist whose career path most closely mirrors that of Ikemura, however, is Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948) who described himself as “baptized in Marxism and existentialism”. After being locked out of the Economics Faculty of Tokyo University because of student riots, he left Japan in 1971 for Moscow and Eastern Europe. He eventually made his way to LA where he began to study photography, became an artist, and eventually learnt about traditional Japanese culture and art. He currently works between New York and Tokyo. See Kerry Brougher and David Elliott, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Ostfildern-Ruit, Hatje Cantz, 2006, 18.

In Granada a chance encounter with an artist who carved religious images led to work in his studio and reawakened her childhood interest in art. Looking at her drawings and at the few objects she made there, he suggested that she should sit for the highly competitive one-week-long admission exam for the Academy of Fine Arts in Seville. She went ahead and was offered a place. She started working there in the autumn of 1973 and graduated in 1978.10

Although she had managed to escape from the peculiarly Japanese fusion of feudal hierarchy and economic boom that she found so oppressive, she now found herself living in General Franco’s Spain, where the government was one of the few surviving fascist dictatorships of the 1930s. This irony was not lost on her but in a strange way it enabled her to enjoy the liberation of being an outsider – as far as she knew, the only Japanese person living in Seville. She remembers this time with elation as “the most free in my whole life. Because daily life was difficult and people were poor, we really helped each other. I had little money but I never went hungry. It was really the most beautiful of times. ” 11

By the standards of Western Europe, the teaching at the Seville Academy was ultraconservative. Ikemura studied art history as well as the media and genres of traditional European art, drawing from plaster casts, painting allegories and religious images, carving and casting, engraving, etching and making other kinds of prints, with an additional smattering of Cubism and Fauvism to bring it up to date. She was also able to travel widely throughout Europe – as far as Turkey and North Africa – visiting museums, galleries, churches, sites and monuments, absorbing a vast range of art and culture from Ancient Egypt and Greece, through the Renaissance, the Baroque, Mannerism, Classicism, Romanticism and Realism to Modernity, comparing it with what she already knew. The classes of her drawing master in Seville stood her in good stead as they taught her to work quickly, fluidly, to capture movement from life. This formed the basis for her next development.

Unlike many of her European peers, Ikemura had no investment in being avant-garde. Following on from her experience in Japan, her starting point as an independent artist was in thinking about gender from the point of view of eroticism rather than sexuality. While still a teenager she had been sceptical of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin and the sexual guilt that this inevitably implied. Once she began to travel outside Japan she found “the stereotypical divisions between art made by men and women absurd. ”12 The erotic could be found in all forms and conditions of life, even in the Church paintings of the Renaissance. It was “the concentration of existence and this is what distinguishes it from what we call sexuality. Sexuality does not really interest me because it has become a commodity in Consumer Society. (…) [T]he erotic, however, has a much greater dimension because it is a source of energy in nature. ” 13 Within Ikemura’s rapidly developing cosmology of art, poetry and thought, the erotic was intimately concerned with the conflicting energies of rebirth and death.

kAMIkAZE, CAtS AnD HOrSES

“I am a cat. As yet I have no name. I’ve no idea where I was born. All that I remember is that I was miaowing in a dampish dark place when, for the first time, I saw a human being. This human being, I heard afterwards, was a member of the most ferocious human species; a shosei, one of those students who, in return for board and lodging, perform small chores around the house. I hear that on occasion this species catches, boils and eats us. However as at that time I lacked all knowledge of such creatures, I did not feel particularly frightened. I simply felt myself floating in the air.” 14

Natsume Soseki, I Am A Cat, (1905–11)

During her time in Spain and the years immediately after, Ikemura had protected within herself a naïvely distanced view of life that is also clearly expressed in the words of Soseki’s egregious hero. A satire on the pretensions of different social types, the author makes his imaginary feline society and its interaction with humans an absurd Bakhtinian allegory that makes its point by turning dominant hierarchies on their heads. A similar sense of distractive subversion and humour can be seen in the first works that Ikemura made once she left Spain and started to work as an independent artist.

During the late 1970s Ikemura had been travelling increasingly throughout Western Europe, spending the summers in Switzerland where she found summer jobs that helped support her throughout the year. Once she had graduated from the Academy it was time to move. Liberated from Franco’s dictatorship, Spain was quickly rediscovering its past and making a new future. In the intense social ferment that followed there was little space for outsiders. In 1979 Ikemura packed everything into a small car and drove from Seville to Lucerne in Switzerland where she settled for a few months before moving to Zurich and marrying an art historian she had recently met. She held her first solo exhibition in 1979 in the small Galerie Regenbogen in Lucerne.15

She spoke not one word of German – nor Schweizerdeutsch. In a large rented studio she started work on a series of large drawings and acrylic paintings on paper, the best known of which is Kamikaze (1980), a painting based loosely on a wartime photograph of a Japanese suicide pilot plunging towards an aircraft carrier. 16 This work, emblematic of

10 Leiko Ikemura, Transfiguration, 218. 11 Ibid. 12 Leiko Ikemura, “Erotik in ihrer Ausstrahlung hat eine unaussprechbare Trauer”, Interview with Gerlinde Gabriel, Leiko Ikemura Stadtzeichnerin von Nürnberg, Nuremberg, Kunsthalle, 1984, 10. 13 Ibid, 9. 14 Natsume Soseki, I Am a Cat, 1905–11, translated by Aiko Ito & Graham Wilson, Boston, Tuttle, 2002, 3. translated by Aiko Ito & Graham Wilson. 15 She had her first exhibition in 1979 in the small Gallery Regenbogen in Luzern. 16 Kamikaze, acrylic on paper, 119 × 89.5 cm.

both Japanese and world history and also, ironically, of Ikemura’s path as an artist, is the embodiment of a constantly flickering rite of passage: between life and death, light and darkness, being and nothingness, air and water, man-made and natural. “When I was young, the art world was based on the attitude of taking a critical spirit toward the social system,” she wrote, but by the 1980s “art works were being assimilated into the manufacturing cycle (…) and began to function within capitalist society. 17 For an artist with such misgivings, the move to Switzerland, one of the epicentres of world banking, was a paradox to say the least.

Cut loose in a country she hardly knew, she began to regard “the space of [her] work [as] a contested arena” , 18 and “allegorically expressed human aggression in the dark side and ugliness we unconsciously possess within us. ” 19 Ideas of “risk” and “freedom of consciousness” started to become important and she struggled to express them in ways that were fluid, anti-formulaic and open to experience, however daunting or unpleasant they may be. Married, yet somehow still by herself, she had to test what she meant by “freedom of consciousness (…) the potential to create a universal expression that begins from an individual (…) [yet also] the responsibility involved in that freedom. ”20

Ikemura was quickly accepted in her new found home, receiving in 1981 both a grant from the City of Zurich and the prestigious Kiefer Hablitzel Foundation’s Art Prize. She also got to know her new artist neighbours and throughout the 1980s, even after she had left the country, exhibited with them abroad – including Japan – as an artist from Switzerland.21

Drawings were her strongest and most prolific work at this time and she had clearly studied the jerky Expressionism or tragic Symbolism of early moderns such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (Fig. 2, p. 252), Ferdinand Hodler, or the Outsider artist, Louis Soutter. Her academic training had previously familiarised her with many different historical styles and graphic media as well as with the chameleon line drawings of Picasso and Matisse. She described line as “the skeleton of thought, visual thought, but also a memory of the body, (…) a seismograph of the soul”, that expressed both depth and complexity of emotion.22 Throughout the early 1980s Ikemura was drawing obsessively, with line taking on a life of its own, playing through different motifs and ideas, many of which were to resurface in her paintings.

Wild Cats and Domesticated Cats, a book of sixty-one drawings published in 1983, was edited down from many hundreds of different sketches and chronicles a darkly humorous sexual comedy in which the cat, as in Soseki’s novel, was an all-powerful, elemental creature that commented on, and in the process subverted, the futility of human, and particularly male, endeavour.23 References in the drawings also point to Ikemura’s reading of Jack Kerouac’s beat classic On The Road (1957), as well as to the edgier and more misogynistic writings of William Burroughs. In these works with

charcoal and pencil often mixed together, image builds upon image with surrealistic verve: a naked male body lies in a pipe with one foot in a cat’s mouth; carp, the symbol of Boy’s Day in Japan, jump into cats’ mouths; a man appears to be frenetically beating a drum, like a refugee from a painting by Carl Hofer; 24 multiple zigzag bodies are interlocked; disembodied “oriental” heads are stacked, linked to each other by eccentric single lines; a cat’s gaping maw swallows an aeroplane; a Japanese girl with hair pins morphs into a cat…

Her paintings of this time are less fluid than her drawings and suggest a more laboured search for significant imagery. Unerwünschtes Kind (Unwanted Child, 1982) depicts two robotic figures lying on the ground clasping “boy carp” kites on poles, the feet of one seemingly disappearing into the concrete-block-chest of the other.25 It is an enigmatically disquieting work that relates back to previous drawings as well as forward to the looping self-wounding forms of yet to be made sculptures. Kaiserin tötet Kaiser (The Empress Kills The Emperor, 1983) is more obvious in its approach. On an acid green “barge” diagonally slanting across a bilious yellow “sea” are two dark-skinned, white-clothed figures. The standing woman wields a long “Japanese” sword above her head. Below her a kneeling man leans back, perhaps in dread. Painted in a consciously childish, cartoon-like way, this murderous scene discloses neither strong feeling nor detail of expression. In fact, paradoxically, it almost seems like a joke.

Ikemura’s first large solo show in a public space was held in 1983 at the Kunstverein in Bonn, then the capital of the German Bundesrepublik.26 In 1983–84 she moved to Nuremberg, a city that, like her home town, had been flattened by war; here she worked on a year’s residency as Stadtzeichner, and showed a large selection of paintings and drawings at the Kunsthalle at the end of the project.27

The motif of being “cut off”, “decapitated”, and separated from rational thought is predominant in both her drawings and paintings of this time. In its place Ikemura was starting to suggest different visual equivalents of emotion but she was not yet sure what

17 Leiko Ikemura, Transfiguration, 218. 18 Ibid, 194. 19 Ibid, 222. 20 Ibid, 225. 21 Ikemura exhibited as a Swiss artist in the 1988 Tokyo Biennale as well as in a number of other international exhibitions during the 1980s. 22 Malsch, 1998, 79. 23 Leiko Ikemura, Wild cats and domestic cats, Zurich, Editions Stähli, 1983. This was her first artist’s book. 24 During the 1930s and ‘40s Berlin-based painter Carl Hofer (1878–1955) used the figure of Der Trommler (The Drummer) in his work as an expression of warning and resistance against Nazism. It is the central motif in the second version of his famous painting Die schwarzen Zimmer (The Black Rooms, 1943) in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. 25 Unerwünschtes Kind, acrylic on canvas, 120 × 200 cm. 26 Her first exhibition in a public space had been in 1981 at the Städtisches Bodensee-Museum, Friedrichshafen, Germany. 27 Stadtzeichner: a City-funded residency for an artist specialising in drawing. See ex. cat. Leiko Ikemura Stadtzeichnerin von Nürnberg.

form these could take in painting. Her work was being noticed but it did not fit easily into any recognisable “box” and no one quite knew where to place it. In some exhibitions she was associated with the newly fashionable Neuen Wilden, 28 a generation of predominantly German, male, neo-Expressionist painters who tried to synthesise different forms of “personal mythologies” in works that satisfied both an imagined zeitgeist and the art market.29 But Ikemura rebelled against such superficial categorisations and intensified the process of self-interrogation that had initially led her to leave Japan. In 1984, immediately after her Nuremberg exhibition, she moved to work in Munich for a few months and then, later in the year, set up her studio in Cologne, at that time a vital hub for both artists and galleries. She did not return to Switzerland and her marriage broke up. The following year her father died.

In Munich she had first begun to experiment with photography by producing chemigrams, automatic drawings of chemicals on photo paper that appear rather like monotypes. In a recent exhibition at the Museum für Asiatische Kunst in Berlin, photographic still lives of withering plants expanded this idea, taking on the sombre role of memento mori. Bridges between life, dreams and death, these works provided a strong but barely audible base note for the sculptures installed in the same space.30 Ikemura still continues to use photography as a fluid underpinning to her drawings and watercolours, liking the fact that, during the process of printing, the images literally emerge out of the surface of the paper.

Her new large paintings in Cologne now began to combine surrealism with allegory. Verkündigung (Annunciation, 1985) is a carefully modulated exercise in reverse symmetry in which an “angel” hangs upside down from the top edge of the painting to confront a standing “virgin” . 31 Both appear to have wings but these may also be understood as large exotic leaves or the branches of trees. Paradoxically, both figures clamp their mouths shut with their hands. This is an annunciation in which nothing was said. In Haarwaschende (Woman Washing Her Hair, 1986), the dissolving, constricted forms and tortured colours suggest encounters with French informel, the early paintings of Francis Bacon and many other influences. Yet for me, her most successful works of this time are the series made around the Trojan War.

These large paintings, made with oil paint on canvas, were prompted by two main ideas. She wanted to revisit the vexatious topic of recent Japanese history and could see in the Trojan myth an analogy through which she could approach the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbour and its aftermath without having to make literal references that would limit either the broader suggestibility of her work or how it related to the causes and impact of war.32 But she had also recently read Christa Wolf’s newly published novel Kassandra (1983) in which the Siege of Troy was described as a gendered Manichaean battle for economic power, whose result marked a shift away from matriarchy to a society dominated by men. 33

The consciously naïve drawing and composition of Kriegsgöttin (Goddess of War, 1986), one of the largest works in this series, sketches out a violently chaotic and divided territory rather like a dream map of unconscious conflicts and desires. This is dominated at the centre by a tall black “destroyer” who stomps on the head of a vicious, flat-headed, three-eyed, cat-fish-like creature with a long tail that snakes diagonally across the painting.34 Women gather on the right, one firing down from a “breast enhanced” watchtower while the “destroyer” dumps disembodied heads and figures into a large vessel that occupies the left side of the painting. A white horse looks away in the opposite direction, not a wooden construction but one of flesh and blood with a hollow stomach that seems to be disembowelled. The horse that appears in nearly all these works is reminiscent of Kandinsky’s early painting Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider, 1903).35 Within this carnage an almost comic element prevails, indicated by the chains of association provoked by the work’s outsider imagery and style, the root of their sophistication. This tapestry of cruel and futile conflict between the sexes was elaborated further in such enigmatic and magisterial paintings as Pearl Harbour (1986), Trojanischer Krieg (Trojan War, 1986) and other related works.36

As impressive as many of these paintings still appear, Ikemura realised that she was facing a crisis in her work. Caught between the rock of mythology, an overused trope in the Western art world in the 1980s, and the hard place of allegory, an approach still taught in the art academies of the East (particularly in the German Democratic Republic), she began to realise that she wanted to follow neither path. She felt dissatisfied with the paintings she had made, but did not know how to act next. Her art had become a talisman against the alienation she had felt since childhood, yet the materialist art criticism that prevailed in Germany approached art dialectically, as if there were embedded within it some unknown solution that could be discovered through reason. For her this was no solution; she had always approached the world intuitively and realised that what often appeared to be opposites were actually different aspects of the same thing.

28 As in Die neue Künstlergruppe – Die wilde Malerei, 1982, Klapperhof, Cologne, Germany. 29 The term “personal mythologies” had been coined by Swiss curator Harald Szeemann in relation to these artists. Ikemura was extremely critical of the term, arguing that mythologies by their nature had to be collective. See Leiko Ikemura Stadtzeichnerin von Nürnberg, 10. 30 Leiko Ikemura, Korekara or the Exhilaration of Fragile Being, Berlin, Museum für Asiatische Kunst, 2012. 31 Verkündigung, 1985, acrylic on canvas, 210 × 240 cm. 32 Leiko Ikemura, Transfiguration, 222. 33 At that time Christa Wolf (1929–2011) was one of the leading writers and intellectuals in the GDR whose works were concerned with an honest examination of the Self against the changing regimes of history. 34 Kriegsgöttin, 1986, oil on canvas, 200 × 250 cm. 35 This painting provided the name for the group of avant-garde artists, which included Kandinsky, who exhibited together in Munich from 1911–14. 36 Pearl Harbour (1986) oil on canvas, 200 × 160 cm; Trojanischer Krieg (1986) oil on canvas, 190 × 300 cm. 37 Über das Licht, 1987, oil on canvas, 170 × 250 cm.

During the latter half of the 1980s her visits back to Japan became more frequent and Ikemura started to learn more about the aesthetic traditions and history of Japanese art. The result was that she began to think about both her work and pictorial space in a completely different way. The beginning of this can be seen in the later works of the Trojan cycle in which narrative gradually recedes and illusionistic space dissolves into semi-opaque consecutive planes out of which figures and objects tentatively emerge. She was moving away from the idea of art as a depiction of something, and towards art as a prompt for sensation and feeling. In Über das Licht (Over the Light, 1987), one of the last paintings in this series, light-suffused riders career across the surface while in the dark background a tall silent figure stands by a backlit aperture.37 A corona seems to circle its head as if it were a supplicant Bodhisattva – or even a crown of thorns.38

InDIAnS, gIrLS AnD OtHEr StrAngE CrEAturES

“That place was close to Segantini’s village, but the high altitude light that entered from the thick, deep castle windows was extremely clear and I realised (…) that painting needed to be a non-physical, spiritual medium.” 39

Leiko Ikemura

In 1988 Ikemura worked next to Lake Starnberg near Munich for two months. The flat, still reflection of the water helped her to reflect. “I love the water,” she later wrote “I’m addicted to it; creative forces come from the water… and from the sky. Nothing else. Whether it is the ocean, a lake or a river, water is the origin for me, [it helps me to] arrive at new motifs and find motivation. ”40 But water was not the only element at play. She had just started to make her first sculptural works out of unfired clay.41 Modelled out of crude earth, these works acted as the other side of the same coin. Small grotesque homunculi, reminiscent of 4000 year-old terracotta figures (do gu, Fig. 3, p. 257) or primitive medieval church carvings, derived from her paintings and drawings. From this point on her sculpture was both a complement to, and the opposite of, her paintings and graphics.

From the autumn of 1988, spilling over into the following year, Ikemura spent six months working at Fürstenau Castle near the small village of Grisons in the Swiss Alps, an area that had attracted Symbolist artists such as Segantini towards the end of the nineteenth century. During her stay, what she described as a “paradigm shift” occurred. She realised that she wanted painting to be “a non physical medium”, also “embedded” in the mountain landscape in which she had discovered “crystalline forms and sculptural formations that were transformed out of their fixity by the simultaneous influences of immateriality and the dissolution of elements.”42 Ikemura began to enter a more fluid morphological universe, just as she had begun to take a greater interest in sculpture.

Alpenindianer (Alps Indian, 1989–90), a suite of nine acrylic paintings on canvas made during her stay at Fürstenau Castle, was conceived on a smaller scale than the Trojan works. Starting from the ironic motif of the “Alps Indian”, no doubt a portrait of the nomadic artist herself, the space encompassed within these paintings indicates a completely different attitude towards figure and ground. Continuing more fluidly the tentative spatial experiments broached in the later Trojan works, Ikemura now conceived of space as compressed, flattened, and stacked within the same planar matrix, a little like in classical Chinese painting. As is often the case, a short poem accompanies this series to provide a not so serious “narrative”.43 The primordial figure of the Indian, comprised of the same atoms as the surrounding mountainous landscape, appears in and out of focus like a shadow, becoming increasingly abstract as the traces of brush, sponge and finger on the canvas veer away from description to acquire a haptic significance. With a conscious humour, Ikemura rethinks and refashions the tradition of European Romantic landscape by rendering her reactions and emotions into visual incident. The sansui aesthetic of classical landscape painting became increasingly important in her work because it confirmed her natural proclivities. 44 To such an extent, in fact, that Skifahrer auf dem Malojasee (Skier on Maloja Lake, 1990), the eighth work in the series, is based on the compositional layout of one of Sesshu - To yo -’s most famous works Landscapes of Autumn and Winter, which is now in the collection of the National Museum in Tokyo.45

Ikemura’s landscape paintings are never “pure” landscapes but also fulfil the role of psychic maps. Although their appearance has changed considerably since the beginning of the 1990s, her current attitude towards painting was forged at this time. Ikemura remembers that when making these works she often used to compare the landscapes of Sesshu and Cézanne, particularly their emphasis on construction and brush strokes. The result was that a more analytical, planar construction of space replaced her former

38 This syncretistic approach continues throughout Ikemura’s work from this time. See, for example, the works shown in Mars Mother, Kunst-Station Sankt Peter, Cologne, 2005, and her solo show in the KOLUMBA Kunstmuseum des Erzbistums, Cologne, in the same year. It can also be seen in the development of her landscape painting over the past decade, particularly in the sansuiga works influenced by traditional Chinese and Japanese art. 39 Leiko Ikemura, Transfiguration, 159. She refers to the Swiss mountain village of Grisons. Giovanni Segantini (1858–1899) was a popular Italian landscape painter who towards the end of his career became an avant-garde Divisionist and Symbolist. 40 Leiko Ikemura, Sauerland-Museum, 2010, 142. 41 Her first sculptures were made in 1987 and 1988 and were exhibited in Leiko Ikemura, Von der Wirkung der Zeit, Kunstverein Lingen, 1988. 42 Leiko Ikemura, Transfiguration, 159 (retranslated by the author). 43 Ikemura regards irony or cynicism as “too cold”, and employs a more equivocal and distanced humour in her work. Malsch, 1998, 29. 44 Sansui refers to the Chinese characters for “mountain” and “water”, the dominant characteristics of classical Chinese and Japanese landscape paintings: sansuiga. Her preferred Japanese artists include Sesshu To yo - (1420–1506), Hasegawa To -haku (1539–1610), Nagasawa Ro - setsu (1754–1799), Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797–1861). 45 These works were shown in her first solo exhibition in Japan. Leiko Ikemura, Alpenindianer, Tokyo, Satani Gallery, 1990.

reliance on line. She now began to think of her own paintings as sansuiga: “The underlying context was to create an associative transformation of images, such as a human figure that is blended into a rock. In that expression the elements of a human figure and nature were united through an abstract formative language.”46

In 1991 Ikemura was made Professor of Painting at the Berlin University of Fine Arts and began to split time between there and Cologne.47 As she had done ten years prior, she returned to drawing to help clarify visual and emotional thought. Drawings and watercolours of odd blobby figures, sometimes described as cephalopods, translated themselves into paintings of strange unknown hybrid creatures. These images then began to resurface as glazed earthenware figures. Some were between about 20 and 40 cm high and shown on plinths, others were much higher and freestanding. The earliest terracotta works seem to be based on the visual equivalent of word plays: Mehrbrusthuhn (Many Breasted Chicken, 1990) rhymes a coxcomb with the multiple breasts of an ancient classical goddess; Hausfrau (Housewife, 1990) is both a monolithic block and an open box rather like an ancient funerary urn, while Haus-Mann (House Husband, 1990) seems like a cross between an animal head with pointed ears, and a house with many windows. Around this time she had become particularly interested in the sculptures, objects and installations of Louise Bourgeois, as well as in the “spatial concepts” (slash paintings), sculptures and ceramics of Lucio Fontana (Fig. 4, p. 258). 48 These encouraged her to refine the fusion of autobiography, memory, imagination and form in her own work, along with ideas of positive and negative space.

In some of these works the smaller heads run directly into the bodies, or could even be missing. Glazed busts in varied colours depict non-specific creatures with benign, friendly expressions, as well as some that seem anguished or in pain. Ikemura regards these works as “vessels of being”; 49 in other words as physical expressions of the permeability between form and non-form, life and oblivion. Creating this sublime interface, she often works on a domestic scale, citing animals (a long-eared hare or Miko, her cat) or vegetables (a “cabbage” head or figure made of asparagus) to create dislocated, child-like hybrids that both contain and transmit emotion. Sensory organs, such as eyes or mouth, are often expressed as wounds or holes in the surface of the clay, rhyming with the void that remains at the centre of the work. Ikemura uses the Japanese word utsuro, void or hollow, to describe this aesthetic which is related to the idea of ma, a gap, space, breath or pause between pictorial elements, that were now becoming increasingly important in her two-dimensional work.

In 1995 Ikemura began to concentrate on series of minimal paintings of doll-like girl figures lying or standing against coloured grounds. The size of these works was generally smaller than those she had made before, and they were all executed in oil paint either on cotton duck or an absorbent rough burlap. Detail is stripped back, the features of the figures are indistinct, and their forms often bleed into the background. What remains is

a reference to, rather than a depiction of, girlhood, and an almost music-like notation of colour and form. Ikemura was well aware of the increasing infantilism within Japanese popular culture during the 1980s and ‘90s and how this was beginning to have an impact on art. The cult of the kawaii, the sickeningly cute, focuses on images of innocent, defenceless small girls or animals in order to fetishise them into an absurd parody of adult desire (Fig. 5, p. 262). 50 Her works, particularly her paintings and sculptures of girls and animals, are a response to this. Although partly a parody, these works are also intent on reappropriating the image of girlhood as a neutral, even innocent, motif completely devoid of sentimentality.51

In a sense these girls are messengers from another world. Ikemura associates their floating or gliding quality (and lack of visible legs or feet) with the Japanese idea of yu -rei. Its literal meaning is “faint soul” but it signifies “ghost”, the kind of terrifying creatures that appear in nightmares, classical novels and Japanese woodblock prints. Their otherworldly disembodiment makes them all the more unsettling as they wreak mute revenge on mindlessness, superficiality and commercialism.

BEyOnD tHE HOrIZOn

“My first view of the ocean came as an awakening. Of course I must have seen the ocean before, but this is my earliest and most vivid recollection of it. I spied it from a To -kaido . Line train, the seascape passing from left to right. It must have been autumn, but the sky had such vast eye-opening clarity. We were riding high on a cliff and the sea flickered far below like the frames of a motion picture, only to disappear suddenly behind the rocks. The horizon line where the azure sea met the brilliant sky was razor sharp, like the blade of a samurai sword. Captivated by this startling yet oddly familiar scene, I felt I was gazing on a primordial landscape. Perhaps it is strange that a child should have pre-life memories, much less words to express them. The experience left an indelible mark on me.”

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Images from Memory52

46 Leiko Ikemura, Transfiguration, 219. 47 Since 1991 she has lived and worked between Cologne and Berlin, and is now settled solely in Berlin. 48 Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010), French American artist. Lucio Fontana (1899–1968), Italian painter and sculptor. 49 Leiko Ikemura, Being, Nagoya, Gallery Ham, 1995. See also Malsch, 1998, 61. 50 See David Elliott, Bye, Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2011. 51 “Sentimentality is something I don’t like. ‘Sentiment’, yes, in the sense of emotion but exaggerated emotionality and kitsch never go beyond cliché.” Leiko Ikemura, Sauerland-Museum, 2010, 146. 52 Hiroshi Sugimoto, “The Times of my Youth: Images from Memory”, in Kerry Brougher and David Elliott, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Ostfildern-Ruit, Hatje Cantz, 2006, 14. 53 Leiko Ikemura, Transfiguration, 69.

Between 1997 and 1999 Ikemura started painting black backgrounds behind the girls. For her this was “the colour of nothingness/ warm eternal colour/ the colour for being the loneliest”.53 The lying or crawling figure of the young girl that constantly reappeared in both the paintings and sculptures of this time was not only an enigmatic harbinger of discoveries yet to be made, of lives yet to be lived, but also a primordial expression of mourning and grief, a stripping down of detail and reference to reveal the mind-numbing realisation of the works’ silent, non-existent core. Not surprisingly, as Ikemura continued to work on this theme, the figure of the young girl grew into an adult. The women then began to appear in groups, bathing on the shore of the ocean, the notation of their bodies scattered across the surface of the painting, not unlike the trees or flowers in the horizontal composition of a traditional Japanese screen. And in this continuous process of transfiguration, a word which Ikemura has often used to describe how she works, the figure faded away to leave only a horizontally striated background like a horizon, or a number of them, in divisions of colour and space similar to that in Kamikaze (1980), one of her earliest paintings, in which the horizon marked a tremulous cataclysmic dividing line between the infinite expanses of sky and ocean.54

The circularity of transfiguration is deeply inscribed within all animistic beliefs, and the idea of layering – image, media, space, reality – is central to Ikemura’s mature work. Throughout all of her works one form, thing, emotion or memory transforms into something else, taking on many aspects. Speaking of the Horizon paintings, she has pointed out that “actually there is no stillness [only] stasis which emerges via movement.”55 The floating heads and women that appear in front of the horizons, and on plinths as larger terracotta sculptures, are “metaphors for an explicit intermediate state, one that doesn’t actually occur [but] exists only in the imagination… Fragments of an existential condition [they become] a metaphor for permeability”.56 In these works Ikemura tries to imagine the sensation of flying in order to regress beyond perception to realise the communality of all things. This includes our relation not only to other animals but also to the framework of creation itself. I derive a similar feeling looking at the barely visible details on Brancusi’s simplified heads which almost seem like water smoothed rocks; the drawings of Odilon Redon in which an eye transmutes into a hot air balloon, a spider’s body into a face, or a flower into a human being; the early drawings of Emil Nolde where gigantic, craggy heads are formed out of mountain tops; or the mystical cosmogonies of Xul Solar in which words, bodies, fantastic creatures, mountains, and cities have interchangeable elements that express each other in their form.57 A similar metaphysics of connectivity remains the central subject of Ikemura’s art. This is humorously illustrated in a woodcut made by Utagawa Kuniyoshi some time during the 1840s which Ikemura incorporated into a recent exhibition of her work: a posturing young samurai is dressed in a fashionable blue and white robe with a pattern of skulls printed on it. On closer examination the skulls are made up of white cats playing with their kittens; a stool slung nonchalantly over the handle of his sword also reveals a scary face in the grain of its wood.58

“I sometimes think that I’m a medium rather than an artist,” she has recently said. “Similar to a miko [shrine maiden or spiritualistic medium], I feel as if I’m driven by some unknown force. (…) I cannot dissociate my production and my life. I’ve already lived in Europe for almost forty years, but without figuring out if I have really adapted to European cultures. I’m connected to a cultural life while also feeling that ‘I’m different in some respects.’ This is a typical feeling for an étranger. ” 59

The fate of the artist is to be distanced – an outsider. Without this no context can be expressed, no clarity found, no valid self-criticism uttered. In relation to how emotions surface in her works Ikemura has often used the word “authentic”, but I suspect that she means “truthful” – the ability to look experience in the face and to express even that which is painful. In the house that Ikemura has built for herself throughout her work, she has trodden a path that has led from the dark cellar of self-centred existentialism that she experienced in her youth, to the glimmering horizon that expresses another kind of void. Over a period of nearly forty years, Le néant, the terrifying absence that opposes all existence, has been transmuted through experience into a positive understanding of the necessity for void or emptiness. Here the transcendence of self signifies the illusory nature of personal desire and a celebration of the infinite connectivity of the universe.

“The compulsion to be happy is a collective psychosis. At the most it is only a brief fulfilment of desire. But I know another kind of happiness – better to say moments of happiness – I experience these in nature.”60

54 “Transfiguration” is the title of her 2011 retrospective at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo as well as of the book Leiko Ikemura, Transfiguration From Figure to Landscape, Berlin, Distanz-Verlag, 2012. 55 Leiko Ikemura, Sauerland-Museum, 2010, 151. 56 Ibid, 148. 57 Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957), Romanian French sculptor. Odilon Redon (1840–1916), French Symbolist artist. Emil Nolde (1867–1956), German Expressionist painter. Xul Solar (1887–1963), Argentine artist, writer, and inventor of imaginary languages. 58 Leiko Ikemura, Korekara. 59 Leiko Ikemura interview, Mie Prefecture, November 2010 in Leiko Ikemura: Transfiguration, 217. 60 Leiko Ikemura, Malsch, 1998, 102.

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