Katsutoshi Yuasa Exhibition VR at Yuki-Sis Gallery Oct 9 – 30 2021 I have been a student recently, of a genial Friday mokuhanga (woodblock printing) class and last week we accompanied our sensei to an exhibition of his recent work. Katsutoshi Yuasa’s practice is described as a fusion of mokuhanga, photography and digital technologyi. There, in a gallery in Nihonbashi we were invited, unusually, to gaze into a small pool of water at an artwork. The water is held in an unassuming plywood timber box – not painted white, not a plinth for display, nor a wall for eyelevel hanging, but here, a functional viewing box. The effect is to subtly shift the usual mode of looking at works in a gallery, away from the purely visual and towards a more contemplative state. Given that the elements of wood, water and light are so essential to the art of mokuhanga, there is a pronounced materiality to the viewing box that makes one think of the interplay at work between things. Looking down into the water, Narcissus-like, though significantly, through not at the watery lens, the image beyond is as something waiting to be discovered, and this is a quite disarming. As viewers we are drawn into a posture of concentrated curiosity, an invitation by the Yuasa to consider the many ways of seeing. In this, his 8th solo exhibition ‘VR’ at Gallery Yuki-Sis, works cross disciplines, traverse representation and abstraction and pictorially present a compound reality. A reality that resembles haptic experience of the world, filtered through history, meshed with emotion and coloured by memory. As a multi-disciplinary artist, Yuasa’s technical fusing of mokuhanga with digital imaging communicates, with startling immediacy, the impact of shared and personal landscapes. The image seen inside the water-box depicts a thickly forested, tunnel-like bridge structure executed in single point perspective. This bridge is either partly built or partly decaying – the tension between lush organic growth and geometric linearity suggestive of paradox and ambiguity. There is that mystery in the scene itself, but I also think of the dichotomy between surface and illusion, precepts introduced by Renaissance painting. This duality is enhanced by the presence of coloured fibre scraps on the paper surface of the image. Yuasa explains that the kozo paper was made by him by hand from mulberry plants with traditional methods, just last summer in Nishiazu, Fukushima prefecture.
Making own paper, printing by hand and seeing through the light, 2021, water-based woodcut on hand-made paper, 62cm x 85cm
The exhibition title ‘VR’ in its usual (all too familiar) meaning is an acronym for Virtual Reality, a realm of digitally enhanced seeing, usually experienced through a screen. However, the ambitiously realised ‘VR London’ series came about during the recent lockdown-induced isolation and references a different but familiar kind of virtual reality - watching youtube videos of a live walk in London. At once nostalgic and documentary-focussed, making these works enabled Yuasa to return to a city he once lived in, the familiar streets and parks of memory walked again through his woodcarving - the screenshot recreations becoming a new, estranged pictorial reality. Each work directly references the computer screen, dark horizontal bands above and below, right down to a play cursor anchored in the centre of the image. It is only when up close, that we see not pixilation but the striated banding of wood cuts, held and marked in ink. Somehow, the virtuality of these London walks is all the more pronounced in these portrayals; the landscape, the jostling closeness of people, seem to be experiences all the more remote.
VR London Live Walk #2, 2021, water-based woodcut on paper, 59cm x 91.5cm
Other smaller scale works in the exhibition depart from landscape and introduce another reality; that of abstract forms and compositions. The ‘Rhythm of Rain’ series feature circles of varying size and tonalities - the sombre greyed palette and the insistent patterning of rounded shapes evocative of the momentary insularity and percussiveness of a shower of rain. In ‘Figure and Ground’, the series reverses the centrality of subject – a rectilinear void of paper left blank and unmarked is framed – and agin, Yuases employs a similarly muted palette of inked wood stains. The rhythmic collaging of these square forms, after the raindrops, suggest construction and windows, perhaps a reference the push / pull origins of abstract painting. It is interesting that all the works in the exhibition have a reduced colour scale. The
absence of bright colours, the emergence of steady monochromatic forms, all work to implicate the mediation of reality, suggesting half remembered scenes and always, a mediating device: whether a lens, a screen or an imperfect recollection.
Rhythm of rain #2, 2021, water-based woodcut on paper, 36cm x 30cm Figure and Ground #1, 2021, water-based woodblock on paper, 43cm x 31cm
In every work I am conscious (perhaps more so as a student) of the craft; the woodblock carved, the consistent application of pigment into paper as it is pressed wetly and rubbed over the block to receive and record every incision. Yuasa’s craftsmanship is clearly apparent; in the size of the block, the individuality of every carved line and tonality, the meticulous realisation of a compound image in a still (to me) mysterious fusion of mediums. The works are poised reflections on a set of continuing concerns; the traditional history and craft of mokuhanga as a means of communication and documentation, philosophical issues posed throughout the history of painting and visually, the use of perspective, grids and pixels to guide how we see. To return then to that first image, the one seen brightly through water. There, in the allegory of a bridge is a way of crossing between the multiple allusions and illusions. In one online video, Yuasa-sensei can be seen filling the pool within the wooden box, pouring water over his image. And the caption? “The work is made of light and water.”ii Lisa Pang October 2021 All images courtesy the artist, Katsutoshi Yuasa. i ii
Gallery Yuki-Sis, Katsutoshi Yuasa ‘VR’ Exhibition text, available online. www.yuki-sis.com www.katsutoshiyuasa.com