Mitate and Hiroshi Sugimoto

I went to the Chiba City Museum of Art to see Hiroshi Sugimoto’s two part exhibition entitled “Past and Present in Three parts” and “Art and Leisure.”  It was a compact but extraordinarily gorgeous exhibition, which takes in his works including his three great photographic masterpieces and the “toko-no-shiturae,” or artistic settings for a tea ceremony room alcove.    

As a photographer, Sugimoto’s works are very conceptual.  Generally speaking, photos reflect a moment, but he endeavors to show history or the flow of time.  One of his masterpieces “seascape,” consisting of simply sea and sky, was created based on his idea, “Is it possible for us to see the same scenery that ancient people saw?” 

His “theatre series,” consisting of the white screen and the inside of a movie theater shows the passage of time using time-lapse exposure.  The white screens in his photos seem to show nothing but they are the accumulation of the light of 2-hour-movies.  In a sense, we can see a 2-hour-movie in a moment.  For Sugimoto, taking photos doesn’t mean just reflecting the real world.  He shows us the time we’ve never seen before.

 

Before he started his career as a photographer, he was an antique art dealer in NYC.  Still now, he is an art collector and with his expert eyes on Japanese art he carefully chose the combinations of hanging scrolls and artistic objects for a tea ceremony room alcove.  The 27 combinations displayed in the “Art and Leisure” section are innovative because he matched, for example, an old Japanese hanging scroll and a portrait bust statue of Christ harmoniously.

Whenever I see his masterpieces, they remind me of the word “mitate.”  It’s difficult to find an exact word in English, but it might be similar to “metaphor” or “replacing something in a different image.”  Mitate is a very basic way of thinking in traditional Japanese arts, such as landscape design, noh play and pottery.  Sugimoto’s mitate is always beyond my imagination and that’s why I’m strongly fascinated with his works.

photos: Chiba City Museum of Art

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My first Choju-Giga, scrolls of frolicking animals and humans.

One year has passed since I started leaning Japanese style painting.  During the first nine months, I was not allowed to even grip a brush to draw.  Instead, I was told to practice drawing lines, glasses, boxes and sketching flowers to acquire the very basic skills, which is useful for both Japanese and Western painting.

At last, the time has come!  After going through the long boring period of training, I reached the starting point to begin Japanese style painting.  My first lesson was replicating some of the scenes from Choju-Giga, or scrolls of frolicking animals and humans.  OMG!  It’s one of my favorite art pieces.  It was too good to be true.

Choju-giga were drawn in the Heian period by Toba Sojo and other painters.  It depicts the life of wild animals such as frogs, rabbits and monkeys as if they were human beings.  A frog and a rabbit are playing sumo wrestling.  Some rabbits are playing archery.  The livery description of animals evokes some feelings like how wonderful our lives are.

Choju-Giga is considered to be an origin of Japanese manga, or comics.  Although they don't have any speech balloons on the screen, I can imagine the sounds of laughing, singing and shouting coming out of the picture. 

Replicating pictures is a good way to come very close to the painters.  When I trace the lines, I feel the breath of the artist.  “Maybe, he must have stopped his brush here” or “he might have been confident with this strong stroke.”  As I copied his lines, I could understand more about this picture than when I was just looking at them. 

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