The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Trained in the style of Nihonga , which incorporates both traditional Japanese painting techniques and contemporary Western sensibilities, Tomoko Kashiki’s paintings evoke a distinctive pictorial scenario that is at once ancient and contemporary, otherworldly and popular. It is this play of dichotomies that gives her work a delicate profundity. Kashiki is from a generation of artists who grew up in the shadows of luminary Japanese artists such as Yayoi Kusama and Takashi Murakami, and her work displays their influence. In Murakami’s Superflat manifesto of 2000, the artist and curator expanded on Nobuo Tsuji’s 1972 essay ‘The lineage of eccentricity’ to explore the ‘extreme planarity’ of the work of many Japanese artists. 1 In Kashiki’s work, this flatness comes from the handling of pictorial elements which are articulated in a traditional Japanese style — figures are not modelled with shadows and highlights to suggest form, fabric is reduced to patterning, there is no attempt at the illusion of drapes or texture, and landscapes do not employ linear perspective to draw the gaze. Instead, the viewer pans the picture plane and the surface becomes the focus. However, Kashiki’s paintings are not one-dimensional. They appear like a body of water — flat from a distance, but glimpses of what lies beneath are gleaned as the light shifts across the surface. As our gaze penetrates, we become aware of the depth created by layering thin washes, then sanding, rubbing, erasing and reworking them repeatedly. The viewer becomes absorbed in the process of painting, and it would seem the artist becomes equally immersed. An early work, Drawing Person 2008, shows a figure crouching on the floor, who ‘concentrates so much on creating everything around her that her body literally melts away’. 2 Likewise, the ascetic figure in Eating grass 2011 appears to have attained oneness with her craterous surroundings. She sits eating leaves with chopsticks — her posture mimicking the lips of the numerous voids surrounding her, as her garments cascade down her torso and pool in striped puddles around her thighs. Kashiki herself abstains from everyday distractions when she works: I try to think that time stops when I draw. I try not to update myself; I eat the same type of sliced bread for every meal, I listen to the same two minutes of music on loop, endlessly — I eliminate everything except painting and subsistence. 3 Despite her efforts, Kashiki is unable to isolate herself from ever- changing thoughts and feelings: I am perplexed by how these swinging emotions can change a painting — these changes can occur many times, and so the painting becomes multilayered. 4 Rather than suspending time, the shadowy traces that remain from successive reworkings transcribe the complex act of creating and the emotions driving the process. Kashiki’s women all radiate a strange, glamorous presence and latent sensuality. Anatomical correctness is forgone in favour of a form that suits the emotion or whim of the artist. Each is articulated with an organic translucency, embodying the patterns of the background landscape and giving them a decorative substance. The artist’s concept of beauty is as fluid as the ethereal figures she portrays. I am a rock 2012 depicts a woman straddling an upturned, open cardboard box. Her fortress has been infiltrated by water, but, as she floats on her leaf raft, her penetrating gaze is more assured than desperate. ‘Hiding in my room, safe within my womb; I touch no one and no one touches me’, sang Simon and Garfunkel, ‘I am a rock, I am an island’. 5 The figure may be isolated, but she appears buoyantly independent. The recurring theme of water and fluidity is patent in Reverberatory furnace 2012. This painting recalls the imperfect symmetry of monoprint butterflies, created by folding paper loaded with wet paint. Two chimneys of a double-chambered furnace loom in the distance — a relic, perhaps, of the mid-nineteenth century furnace in Tokyo Bay, once used to make cannonballs to protect the city from incursion, and now a monument to the end of Japan’s foreign exclusion policy. The central figure dissolves in a molten sea of pattern, reminiscent of Yayoi Kusama’s obsessive ‘infinity net’ paintings. She is shielded by an umbrella, which offers little protection as its petal-like fabric dissipates into the atmosphere. Tomoko Kashiki’s paintings have an energy born from the artist’s struggle to unify opposing forces — impermanence and permanence, tradition and innovation, presence and absence, superficiality and substance. Like Kusama, who adopts the dot motif to explore her own psyche, Kashiki uses paint to express thoughts and feelings that would otherwise be difficult to articulate. Sarah Stratton 1 Takashi Murakami, ‘A theory of superflat’, in Superflat: Takashi Murakami [exhibition catalogue], Madra Publishing, Tokyo, 2000. p.9. 2 Tomoko Kashiki, quoted in David Elliott, ‘Bye bye kitty’, in Bye Bye Kitty: Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art [exhibition catalogue], Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 2011. p.42. 3 ‘Artist Tomoko Kashiki on how she paints’, The Guardian , <http://www. guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/sep/20/guide-to-painting-tomoko- kashiki 1>, viewed 10 May 2012. 4 ‘Artist Tomoko Kashiki on how she paints’, The Guardian . 5 Simon and Garfunkel, ‘I am a rock’, The Paul Simon Songbook , CBS, 1965. The subtitle of this essay is also a quote from the lyrics. TOMOKO KASHIKI ‘A rock feels no pain and an island never cries’ 139