HIROSHI SENJU AT
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GALLERY MISSION Established in 2000, Sundaram Tagore Gallery is devoted to examining the exchange of ideas between Western and nonWestern cultures. We focus on developing exhibitions and hosting not-for-profit events that encourage spiritual, social and aesthetic dialogues. In a world where communication is instant and cultures are colliding and melding as never before, our goal is to provide venues for art that transcend boundaries of all sorts. With alliances across the globe, our interest in cross-cultural exchange extends beyond the visual arts into many other disciplines, including poetry, literature, performance art, film and music.
CLIFFS, FRONTIERS AND THE ENDS OF THE EARTH
THE ART OF HIROSHI SENJU AND BENESSE ART SITE NAOSHIMA BY
Oben die Geister und unten der Stein —Goethe From the Setouchi Landscape From the late Edo through Meiji eras, around the time Japan opened itself up to the world, many Europeans and Americans visited the country and sailed through the Seto Inland Sea, starting with the German physician Philipp Franz von Siebold, who was affiliated with the Dejima Dutch Trading Post in Nagasaki. According to landscape-theory scholar Masanori Nishida, these foreign visitors interpreted the scenery of the region from a modern perspective, based on the geographical conception of space and their achievements in natural science literature and painting, through accounts and descriptions of their travels.1 Nishida pointed out that their praise for this landscape subsequently led the Japanese to rediscover the scenery around the Seto Inland Sea, which used to be considered a traditional landscape view based on faith or legend. 2 Nishida analyzes which landscapes modern Westerners admired, and what special characteristics these landscape views possessed, through several classifications, such as “sequence views,” or “light, color, and air.” And as an example of the interest in “landforms, geology, and ground cover,” he cites records from a scientific point of view, documented with wide-eyed wonder by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen, who visited Japan in 1867, and John Young, the American secretary who
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accompanied President Ulysses S. Grant on his Japan visit in 1879. They documented the particularities of the mountainous landscape before their eyes, including the volcanic landforms and juxtapositions of mountain surfaces with exposed granite against the greenery and bald mountains on the coast. 3 At the beginning of the 21st century, Hiroshi Senju visited the region, more than one-hundred years after these Europeans and Americans became fascinated with its landforms and vistas—an area previously fought over by pirates, and home to an island whose cave is linked to the mythical island of Onigashima (island of ogres), mixing local myths and folktales. And what he found most absorbing were the cliffs that bore the marks of volcanic eruptions from the distant past. Ishibashi While making preparations for his work in the Naoshima Standard 2 exhibition (2006) and his Art House Project (2009) at Benesse Art Site Naoshima, Senju made exhaustive studies of Naoshima and the surrounding Seto Inland Sea from the sea, sky and land. The result was a total of twenty sketchbooks.4 Overlapping with studies of other places such as the Iguazu Falls in South America, Senju first realized his new series of cliffs which continues to his most recent work, At World’s End.
Left: At World’s End #18, 2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 76.3 x 102 inches/193.8 x 259 cm 5
The Art House Project consists of a cluster of houses built between one-hundred and two-hundred years ago, distinguished by their white stucco walls, charred black-cedar board façades and alternating round and square roof tiles. Scattered around the Honmura district, these empty houses still have something of the flavor of the traditional Japanese townscape. Artists were invited to restore and transform these spaces into artworks, while incorporating traces of the residents’ memories and the past labor that unfolded there. The project started in 1998 with Tatsuo Miyajima’s Kadoya, followed by James Turrell and Tadao Ando’s Minamidera (1999), Rei Naito’s Kinza (2001) and Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Go’o Shrine (2002). Currently, a total of seven houses are open to the public. Hiroshi Senju’s Ishibashi, which was completed in 2009, is housed in the former residence of the wealthy Ishibashi family, who prospered by producing salt at the time when many Europeans and Americans started travelling to the Seto Inland Sea. The size of this house, which is probably the second-largest, if not the largest, built in the period dating from the late Edo through early Meiji eras, speaks to the history of Naoshima as a flourishing center for salt production. For his participation in the 2006 Naoshima Standard 2 exhibition, Senju created The Falls, one of his representative works depicting waterfalls, for the interior of the storehouse with its distinctive high ceiling. Subsequently, he painted cliffs for the fourteen fusuma (sliding panels), as well
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as the storage space above the shelves next to the alcove in the reception room overlooking the garden of the main building. For this three-dimensional spatial installation that also borrows elements from the exterior of the house to envelop the viewer, Senju named it The Garden of Kū—a reference to Buddha’s penetrating insight that “everything in this world is empty,” as well as to the garden as a model for the universe.5 The Passage of Various Times and the Kū Senju first started to paint cliffs upon realizing that the falls he had previously devoted his practice to flowed over them. He was also inspired by his thorough investigations into the use of Japanese washi paper and water-soluble mineral pigments. 6 By leveraging the unique qualities of washi paper (which does not tear or break when crumpled or furrowed, or even when subjected to hot or lukewarm water), as well as water-soluble mineral pigments (which flow vertically downward in obedience to gravity), he crumpled the paper and trickled a coarse amount of mineral pigment downward, starting from the wrinkled top portion. The result was a texture and expression that reminded him of the surface of a cliff.7 Whereas waterfalls are depicted by letting the pigment flow naturally, rock cliffs are painted using mineral pigments, which come from rocks.8 Senju was originally inspired to tackle the genre of nihonga Japanese
painting because of his attraction to the beautifully intense, clear, unmuddled hues of mineral pigments, obtained by crushing blocks of minerals, as well as the power of these particles, which give one the impression of looking at the exposed surface of the rocks themselves.9 Thus, Senju’s cliffs constitute a practice that allows him to approach the essence of his philosophy toward painting. His cliff paintings are neither re-creations of realistic landscapes, nor imagined sceneries akin to traditional ink paintings; rather, they represent an attempt to inscribe the reality of the cliff itself onto a painted surface. Here, in the The Garden of Kū, Senju is taking yet another new approach to the matter. To depict the rocks of deep, uninhabited mountains that cover the right surface of the painting in such minute detail, he uses a natural ultramarine that has been oxidized until it turns black. In contrast, for the bold, blank expanse of sky or void that blankets the left half of the painting, recalling Hasegawa Tōhaku’s Pine Trees folding screen (16th century), Senju has used silver for the base coat. While his use of silver takes its impetus from the flowing water in Ogata Kōrin’s Red and White Plum Blossoms folding screen (18th century), whose black hue was achieved by applying sulfur to silver pigment in order to vulcanize it, the use of silver also seems to be related to the fact that metal refineries in the north of Naoshima still smelt gold, silver and copper.10 At any rate,
Senju’s use of silver complements the dynamic composition that strikes a balance between stillness and movement, giving the painted surface an expressive complexity in spite of the limited range of colors. The white-hued silver of these fusuma, directly exposed to natural light and the air outside through the large windows facing the garden, oxidizes and turns black with the passage of time in accordance with natural laws—a phenomenon alluded to by the black rocks in the right of the painting. Now, eight years after the work was completed, what used to be an almost dazzling silver emits an altogether much duller glow. In certain places, the faint impression of silver faded to gray seems to offer us a glimpse of the mysterious, phantasmal realm lying beyond the tremulous edge of the hazy ocean. Lying within is a fertile emptiness that transforms with the passage of time—where a fleeting transience that changes even within the space of a moment and the workings of the living universe themselves coalesce, stirring the boundless imagination of the viewer to no end. Senju is wary of the idea of immutability that often constitutes a precondition for Western art.11 Taking his cue from a Japanese sensibility that sees beauty in transience, he has previously sought to express different modes pertaining to the passage of time: the flow of water in waterfalls, the spectacle of lava flowing into the
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The Falls, 2006, in the Ishibashi house, Benesse Art Site Naoshima. Photograph by Nacasa & Partners Inc.
ocean or the sight of the shifting sky. By using silver in this work, however, his pictorial surface has accumulated layers of time that are more complex: one witnesses the movement of air itself in the form of mist and haze, or a fluid state where mountain cliffs seem to cascade downward from the right into the ocean on the left. In a certain sense, a cliff expresses the passage of distant time. Trees that wither only to be reborn, and wither once again; the shifting time of days and seasons.‌Here, multiple moments and
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the abyss of time coexist. By being immersed in a space where all the details have been carefully calibrated, such as the lustrous dark wooden floor that reflects its surroundings like a mirror, or the stones paving the dirt floor, and feeling the sound of rain and birds in the courtyard with our five senses, we are prompted to rediscover the fact that the painting, the viewers and the natural world that surrounds it are all part of the harmony and chaos of this vast cosmos.
Senju describes the Garden of Kū as a depiction of “the gleam of morning light moving towards the spectacle of predawn.”12 The artist himself will probably not live far enough into the future to see the various evocative images that will appear within the blank space as the silver becomes progressively more oxidized, or the final, nocturnal “spectacle of predawn.” The completion of this work is not achieved by Senju himself: it transcends the measure of human existence, and entrusts itself to the unfathomable forces of nature, time included. Wounds and Rebirth Just as the meaning and evaluation of artworks may fluctuate with time, artists also often change their minds about how they understand their own works, and their associated meanings. After the Great East Japan Earthquake and the subsequent Fukushima nuclear accidents of 2011, Senju apparently came to a new awareness of the significance of his cliffs technique. 13 At the time, many Japanese artists were overcome with a sense of helplessness, finding themselves unable to make their work and confronted with the necessity of rethinking their practices. Senju has spoken about how his practice of crumpling washi paper that revived an old craft technique has, since the completion of the Garden of Kū in 2009, partially served as a message of hope that evokes rebirth and revival. 14 Since the 2011 disasters, however, Senju’s philosophy of “directly confronting the damage I inflicted myself on the paper, and finding beauty within it—in other words, confronting reality and taking an active involvement in this legacy of loss” has taken on a renewed sense of reality. In this way, the cliffs seem to have acquired a special significance for the artist. The act of grappling directly with the negative inheritance embodied by these wounds is also related to the core activities of Benesse Art Site Naoshima. Many people today are unaware of it, but the genesis of this project was based on the troubled history of these islands. Naoshima, the main hub of the three islands that make up the art
site, had suffered sulfur-dioxide pollution emitted by the metal refinery smelting gold, silver and copper built in the northern part of the island in the early 20th century, causing its mountains to become desolate and treeless. Meanwhile, the construction and subsequent closure of smelting works on Inujima had also wrought havoc on both the island’s landscape and the lives of the islanders. Teshima, whose name in Japanese means “bountiful island,” used to be verdant, but illegal dumping of industrial waste from the mid-1970s throughout the 1980s had transformed part of it into a “garbage island.” 15 The activities of Benesse Art Site Naoshima are confronting this negative legacy caused by excessive modernization and question its true meaning by attempting to utilize what remained on these islands, such as the nature and vernacular culture particular to the region, while also incorporating new elements and fresh perspectives through contemporary art and architecture. In addition to contributing to the revitalization of the area, Benesse Art Site Naoshima also sought to question what it means to “live well.” 16 Many of the artworks that were inspired by this site and emerged out of it resonate with a spirit of resistance, legacy and hope for rebirth. Part of the natural landscape of the Seto Inland Sea that Europeans and Americans used to see as a utopia was casually destroyed as a result of the modernization of the 20th century, and Japan’s rapid economic growth that prioritized the logic of capitalism.17 Today, the frictions resulting from modernization have once again given rise to unrest and violence around the world, and the forces of nature continue to wreak havoc worldwide. As if to sound a quiet warning bell against human arrogance and economic logic gone too far, Senju regards history and the cornerstones of his own sensibility with a steely gaze: with the lofty mind and reverential attitude of the ancients, he scrutinizes the rock reefs and small pine trees that people ceased to even glance at during the high-growth era, creating the grim faces of cliffs that resemble open wounds on the surface of the Earth, and trees that remind us: there is life to be found even here.18
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Hiroshi Senju’s The Garden of Kū, 2009, in the Ishibashi house, Benesse Art Site Naoshima. Photograph by Nacasa & Partners Inc.
At World’s End—The Ends of the Earth When thinking about the subject of cliffs in art history, the first things that come to mind might be Chinese ink painting and the works of Romantic painters such as Caspar David Friedrich, John Martin and Arnold Böcklin. The cliffs in many of these paintings often signal a boundary or portal to another realm, evoking a different spacetime, or a cloistered world. The title given to the newest work in Senju’s series of cliffs is At World’s End: if one reads this as the “end of the world,” the paintings might be understood as depicting the border between life and death. But in fact, the work is more a sort of sequel to his
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previous Cliffs (2012): it refers to the act of training one’s gaze on the other side of the cliff, to the ends of the Earth. 19 Although “the ends of the Earth” also constitute a kind of frontier, for Senju the cliff is not something that divides here from there: it is something that transcends freely. This perspective is intriguing in and of itself, for it faithfully reflects his own stance toward his artistic practice. Although Senju has always been consistently committed to the pursuit of traditional nihonga Japanese painting techniques, he is not averse to actively incorporating contemporary methods into his art as well. He undertakes specially commissioned projects, such as fusuma for the Juko-in at Daitoku-ji temple, in the way of the commissioned painters of old for
Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, while participating in many contemporary art exhibitions abroad. The breadth of his activities is quite spectacular: they span the performing arts, theater design, public art installations for airports and train stations, and in recent years, art direction for these public facilities, as well as huge paintings completed through collaborations with the general public. Senju works freely, transcending the various boundaries that exist between contemporary art and nihonga painting, East and West, or painting and sculpture. The magnitude of this scale appears to be a result of how he has positioned himself in a way that has surpassed any framework, attempting to explore a world of beauty at a more fundamental level.
So-oku Sen, the next grand tea master of the Mushakouji Senke tea school, one of the three main schools of Japanese tea that trace their lineage directly to Sen no Rikyu in the 16th century, has made the intriguing observation that Japanese culture is hybrid in essence, and so is the Japanese tea ceremony. Tea masters, known as michi no mono (literally, “a person of the path�), existed outside the system of hierarchy and status. Because they were able to move freely between all manner of classes and places, they were treated as if they had temporarily disavowed all affiliation. According to Sen, the true pleasure of the tea ceremony lies in the act of creating another world that transcends all barriers such as age, generation, gender and nationality, and offering one’s mind the opportunity to frolic within.20 This attitude of maintaining
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both freedom and an outsider’s perspective while being beyond the existing frameworks dovetails precisely with Senju’s own positioning. There is no paradox in remaining wedded to a Japanese sensibility and aesthetic while also turning toward hybridity and universality. Now, as part of a project commemorating the 1,200th anniversary of Kongōbu-ji temple at Mount Koya, Senju has been commissioned to produce a series of fusuma screens to communicate their message to posterity. He is currently at work painting forty-two fusuma to be installed in the irori and chanoma rooms of the main building, with a view to completing them next year. On a preparatory visit to Cape Muroto while retracing the steps of Kukai, who founded the monastery temple at Mount Koya, Senju inadvertently discovered that Kukai himself had used the term “ends of the Earth.”21 In the area around Cape Muroto facing the Pacific Ocean, separated from Naoshima and the Seto Inland Sea by Shikoku, one can witness the dynamic tectonic plate shifts caused by layers of rocks and earth pushed upward from the ocean floor millions of years ago. Kukai, founder of the Shingon sect of Buddhism, arrived at the far-flung Cape Muroto at the ends of the Earth while searching for a place where he could, as an ascetic, become one with nature and the cosmos. There, he found himself transfixed by the caves and grottoes produced through erosion by seawater. It is said that his Buddhist name Kukai (written with the kanji characters for “sky” and “sea”) comes from the fact that these were the landscapes he glimpsed from within those caves. Senju, too, has visited the various “ends of the Earth” all over the world that evoke the boundaries between the exterior and interior of this planet, and the dynamism of creation, such as the lava plateau at the foot of Kīlauea in Hawaii, or deserts in Australia and Libya. With the same sense of shock and wonder that Westerners felt at the start of the 19th century when they encountered the
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Seto Inland Sea—the ends of the Earth for them—he gazes fixedly at these natural landscapes and sublimates them through painting, as if to experience the history of human painting vicariously, thereby enabling the viewer to “recall” a sensation of discovery and profound emotion that is both old and new at the same time. In a sense, the art of Hiroshi Senju might be said to be a voyage that roams the ends of this Earth to search for and give visual form to something that might be called “open magnetic fields:” places where scientific and artistic viewpoints, both uniquely Japanese and universal sensibilities, the distant past and the future, nature, the cosmos and the human are all connected to each other.
Former chief and senior curator at Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2000–2014), Akiko Miki currently works as international artistic director of Benesse Art Site Naoshima and co-director (artistic) for the Yokohama Triennale 2017 (she was also artistic director of its 2011 edition). She has curated/co-curated important exhibitions in Asia and Europe, including TransCulture at the forty-sixth Venice Biennale (1995); Taipei Biennial Site of Desire (1998); Nobuyoshi Araki: Self-Life-Death (2005); Chalo! India: A New Era of Indian Art (2008); Yokohama Triennale 2011 Our Magic Hour; Hiroshi Sugimoto: Today the World Died (2014); Takashi Murakami: The 500 Arhats (2015); Takashi Murakami’s Superflat Collection—from Shōhaku and Rosanjin to Anselm Kiefer (2016); and Yokohama Triennale 2017 Islands, Constellations & Galapagos. She is also the author/editor of a number of books including Insular Insight (Lars Müller, 2011), which received the DAM Architectural Book Award. This essay was translated from the Japanese by Darryl Jingwen Wee
ENDNOTES 1 Masanori Nishida, “Modern Westerners’ Admiration of the Seto Inland Sea Landscape,” The Japanese Institute of Landscape Architecture, 59(4), 1995. pp. 298–309. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Becoming, Fukutake Foundation, 2013. 5 “Building Art Space,” Naoshima News, Benesse Art Site Naoshima, January 2010. 6 Hiroshi Senju, “On Cliffs,” Design stories, posted October 21, 2016. http://www.designstoriesinc.com/panorama/hiroshi_ senju_1/ 7 Ibid. 8 Hiroshi Senju, “Nihonga no Boken (Adventure of Nihonga),” Waraku, Shogakkan, 2010, et al. 9 Ibid., p. 10. 10 “Building Art Space,” Naoshima News, Benesse Art Site Naoshima, January 2010. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Hiroshi Senju, “On Cliffs,” Design stories, posted October 21, 2016. http://www.designstoriesinc.com/panorama/hiroshi_senju_1/ 14 “Building Art Space,” Naoshima News, Benesse Art Site Naoshima, January 2010. 15 Arbitration between Kagawa Prefecture and its residents regarding the pollution case was settled in June 2000, with the removal of industrial waste being completed at the end of March 2017. The affected areas are currently being restored to their original state. 16 For a detailed account of the founding and conceptualization of Benesse Art Site Naoshima, see the following transcript of a speech by its founder and president. Soichiro Fukutake, “The Seto Inland Sea and I—Why I Brought Art to Naoshima,” the Setouchi International Symposium in 2010. 17 In view of this, the aforementioned Nishida has also pointed out how the wild nature of the area was admired at the time,
the shift in attention from rock reefs and small pine trees to an emphasis on panoramic landscapes, and the loss of an external perspective on the topic. Masanori Nishida, “On the Landscape of the Seto Inland Sea,” Chichu Talk—Japanese Standards on Culture: Five Discussions on the Foundations of Japanese Culture, Naoshima Fukutake Art Museum Foundation, 2008. 18 Hiroshi Senju, “On Cliffs,” Design stories, posted October 21, 2016. http://www.designstoriesinc.com/panorama/hiroshi_senju_1/ 19 From an email by Hiromi Senju while I was preparing to write this essay. 20 Chichu Talk–Japanese Standards on Culture: Five Discussions on the Foundations of Japanese Culture, Naoshima Fukutake Art Museum Foundation, 2008. 21 From an email by Hiromi Senju while I was preparing to write this essay.
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AT WORLD’S END #12
2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 71.6 x 89.5 inches/181.9 x 227.3 cm 14
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AT WORLD’S END #9
2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 57.3 x 38.2 inches/145.5 x 97 cm 16
AT WORLD’S END #11
2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 63.8 x 51.3 inches/162 x 130.3 cm 17
AT WORLD’S END #4
2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 89.5 x 71.6 inches/227.3 x 181.9 cm 18
AT WORLD’S END #6
2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 76.3 x 102 inches/193.8 x 259 cm 19
AT WORLD’S END #5
2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 63.8 x 63.8 inches/162 x 162 cm 20
AT WORLD’S END #7
2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 71.6 x 89.5 inches/181.9 x 227.3 cm 21
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AT WORLD’S END #18
2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 76.3 x 102 inches/193.8 x 259 cm 23
AT WORLD’S END #16
2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 89.5 x 71.6 inches/227.3 x 181.9 cm 24
AT WORLD’S END #17
2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 89.5 x 71.6 inches/227.3 x 181.9 cm 25
AT WORLD’S END #1
2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 71.6 x 89.5 inches/181.9 x 227.3 cm 26
AT WORLD’S END #3
2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 89.5 x 71.6 inches/227.3 x 181.9 cm 27
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AT WORLD’S END #14
2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 76.3 x 102 inches/193.8 x 259 cm 29
AT WORLD’S END #26
2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 25.7 x 31.6 inches/65.3 x 80.3 cm 30
AT WORLD’S END #15
2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 89.5 x 71.6 inches/227.3 x 181.9 cm 31
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AT WORLD’S END #2
2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 76.3 x 102 inches/193.8 x 259 cm 33
AT WORLD’S END #8
2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 71.6 x 89.5 inches/181.9 x 227.3 cm 34
AT WORLD’S END #10
2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 89.5 x 71.6 inches/227.3 x 181.9 cm 35
AT WORLD’S END #21
2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 57.3 x 35.2 inches/145.5 x 89.4 cm 36
AT WORLD’S END #19
2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 51.3 x 63.8 inches/130.3 x 162 cm 37
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AT WORLD’S END #20
2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 63.8 x 51.3 inches/162 x 130.3 cm 39
AT WORLD’S END #22
2017, folding screen, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 51.3 x 152.6 inches/130.3 x 387.6 cm 40
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AT WORLD’S END #23
2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 68.2 x 35.5 inches/173.2 x 90.2 cm 42
AT WORLD’S END #24
2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 37.9 x 69 inches/96.3 x 175.3 cm 43
AT WORLD’S END #25
2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 45.9 x 28.6 inches/116.6 x 72.7 cm
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HIROSHI SENJU
Japanese-born painter Hiroshi Senju is noted worldwide for his sublime waterfall and cliff images, which are often monumental in scale. He combines a minimalist visual language rooted in Abstract Expressionism with ancient painting techniques unique to Japan. Senju is widely recognized as one of the few contemporary masters of the thousand-year-old nihonga style of painting, using pigments made from minerals, ground stone, shell and corals suspended in animal-hide glue.
Hiroshi Senju was the first Asian artist to receive an Honorable Mention Award at the Venice Biennale (1995), and has participated in numerous exhibitions including The New Way of Tea, curated by Alexandra Munroe, at the Japan Society and the Asia Society in New York (2002); Paintings on Fusuma at the Tokyo National Museum (2003); and Frontiers Reimagined at the Venice Biennale (2015). He was recently awarded the Foreign Minister’s Commendation from the Japanese government for contributions to art. In May 2017 he was honored with the Isamu Noguchi Award. Public installations include seventy-seven murals at Juko-in, a sub-temple of Daitoku-ji, a Zen Buddhist temple in Japan, and a monumental waterfall at Haneda Airport in Tokyo. The Benesse Art Site of Naoshima Island also houses two large-scale installations. The artist is currently producing forty-two fusuma for the Kongōbu-ji temple at Mount Koya, Japan, slated for completion in 2018. Senju’s work is in The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; the Museum of Modern Art, Toyama, Japan; the Yamatane Museum of Art, Tokyo; Tokyo University of the Arts; and the Kushiro Art Museum, Hokkaido. In 2009, Skira Editore published a monograph of his work titled Hiroshi Senju. The Hiroshi Senju Museum Karuizawa in Japan opened in 2011. Born in Tokyo, 1958 | Lives and works in New York
SUNDARAM TAGORE GALLERIES new york 547 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001 tel 212 677 4520 • gallery@sundaramtagore.com new york 1100 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10028 tel 212 288 2889 • gallery@sundaramtagore.com singapore 5 Lock Road 01–05, Gillman Barracks, Singapore 108933 tel 65 6694 3378 • singapore@sundaramtagore.com hong kong 4/F, 57–59 Hollywood Road, Central, Hong Kong tel 852 2581 9678 • hongkong@sundaramtagore.com President and curator: Sundaram Tagore Director, New York: Susan McCaffrey Director, Hong Kong: Faina Derman Sales director, Singapore: Melanie Taylor Exhibition coordinator/registrar: Julia Occhiogrosso Designer: Russell Whitehead Editorial support: Kieran Doherty Photography: Yoshichika Murakami, Kazuya Yamaguchi Printed in Hong Kong by CA Design W W W . S U N D A R A M TA G O R E . C O M Photographs © 2017 Hiroshi Senju Text © 2017 Sundaram Tagore Gallery All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. ISBN: 978-0-9967301-3-6 Cover: At World’s End #1 (detail), 2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 71.6 x 89.5 inches/181.9 x 227.3 cm Back cover: At World’s End #17 (detail), 2017, acrylic and natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper mounted on board, 89.5 x 71.6 inches/227.3 x 181.9 cm