We use language as a code to indicate difference from uniformity. If we hear the word “circle,” we each think of the concept of a circle and distinguish it from what is not a circle. That system engenders a commonly held concept through the repetitive use of the word in question, and acts to bring about the same perception within a community where a language is shared. At the core of Western philosophy are the immutable concepts undergirding those shared perceptions, the eidos (visible forms) and ideas (often capitalized as Ideas) perceived by rational thought. According to this thinking, substances, phenomena, conditions, and so on emanate in the physical world from these Ideas. But Ideas exist only conceptually; what we perceive as the physical world is entirely our projection of these Ideas, and it not possible to formulate an Idea perfectly. Nonetheless, different people perceive a circle as a circle, and an understanding then emerges among people that the word “circle” indicates what we think of as an actual circle. In this way, language, the physical world, and concepts become interpenetrated, and the repetition of that further deepens the awareness we share about things.

Gilles Deleuze dissented from this way of thinking. In Difference and Repetition, one of the most important works of contemporary philosophy, he notes that repetition is impossible according to the law of nature, in the process challenging the bedrock of Western philosophy in which thinking derives from the conceptual world. Since the repetition of a concept is intrinsically impossible, Deleuze’s point is an apt one. For that concept to emanate in reality is attendant on some form of materiality. To wit, no matter how carefully we attempt to reproduce a concept, we cannot achieve a perfect repetition. Irrespective of how accurate the imitation, a drawn circle will differ from another in minute ways due to the ink, paper, and movement of the hand when drawing. The same can be said of language. Be it speech (parole) or writing (écriture), at the moment of appearing physically through the medium of sound or ink, language always engenders difference in terms of tone and form, while nonetheless maintaining a semiotic framework able to preserve uniformity. But this is where a richly expressive world unfolds, incorporating infinite degrees of emotion and energy from the feel and texture of something.

Given the above, it becomes highly intriguing then to turn to what Shiryu Morita attempted to do in avant-garde calligraphy. Jiro Yoshihara, the leader of the Gutai Art Association, a prominent Japanese art movement at the time, posited that textuality was “an immense constraint on calligraphy” for the plastic arts, and that calligraphy should be liberated from the shackles of written characters. Shiryu Morita’s response was that characters are not a limitation, but rather that calligraphy can encompass spatiality and temporality precisely because of the framework of characters. What is evident here is Morita’s approach of laying the meaning that characters denote as a foundation in correlation with the expressivity contained in those characters as things written through the medium of a physical body and ink, thus deepening the work. With avant-garde calligraphy, it is common to discuss the influence of Jackson Pollock, known for his action paintings, Georges Mathieu, who prized improvisation through demonstrations of calligraphic technique, and the abstract painter Franz Kline, who knew Morita. But no matter how much avant-garde calligraphy attempted to deconstruct the framework of those characters, the presence bestowed by calligraphy’s development as a framework for characters and by the form of those rendered characters repeats and correlates with the meaning of the characters. In his response to Yoshihara, Morita is showing that this is why the expressive realm of calligraphy is expansive. From that perspective, avant-garde calligraphy explored an appeal to the viewer’s sensitivity by the subtlety glimpsed in the at times intense, at others elegant brushwork, dwelling within the shared concepts repeated across the long history of written characters. The exhibition’s intentionally repetitive display of Morita’s circles (derived from the character for en) shows that while these are the same sign (character), the differences rendered in the written/drawn characters guide the viewer to different imaginal results with each work. This incubates a richness of expression in which écriture and the concepts connoted by the characters are in correlation.

The exhibition also pairs Morita’s work with that of Enrico Isamu Oyama, who has analyzed aerosol writing—a form of graffiti art that emerged in the 1960s—in terms of cultural history and visual expression, and constructed an original methodology he calls Quick Turn Structure. Aerosol writing involves the act of tagging, whereby the artist signs their name to the graffiti. Repeatedly used as a sign indicating the identity that each graffiti writer has constructed, the tag permeated as a token (common language) and as something commonly perceived within a certain community. At the same time, as aerosol writing spread, techniques and a specific kind of aesthetic became established and, out of this, distinctive forms and styles permeated society as a visual language.

From an act of street painting, aerosol writing gradually developed, through its illegality, into an antithesis of existing concepts and authority, or became associated with a form of vandalism encompassing freedom of expression. So, what is it that distinguishes mere graffiti from aerosol writing? Today, it can be said that the materials like aerosol spray and the very particular look of that “brush” have, as mentioned above, increased awareness of aerosol writing as a distinctive form and style, as a single visual language, and have now already permeated society. Oyama’s focus is on this very process of aerosol writing transforming into the visual language that is aerosol writing, permeating society through repetition and the common perception of it among people becoming established. He shaped his Quick Turn Structure out of adapting and reconfiguring that visual language. Here, we can see his interest in the common visual language derived from materiality, matière (art materials), and brushwork beyond iconography.

This exhibition contrasts Morita’s perspective with Oyama’s. As part of the process of characters—conceptually shared signs—manifesting in the physical world through ink, Morita deconstructed the form of characters and, through the refined dynamism felt in the strokes that give characters shape, brought out a correspondence between meaning and representation, and extended the realm of expression. Oyama, on the other hand, deconstructed the image of aerosol writing both in whole and in part, securing these fragments of the dismantled visual language as his own expressive idioms, and then creating his own work by reconfiguring these. Both artists dismantle semiotic systems—respectively, the common language that is written characters repeated and shaped over the course of history, and the visual language shaped within the culture of aerosol writing—and expand their possibilities. And both utilize their deconstructed linguistic systems to reconfigure them and building a new linguistic system unique to the artist. This is further repeated within the artist’s output, thus fortifying as a common language.

The exhibition title, Repetitive Sphere, derives from each artist’s accumulation of spheres. Inspired by Oyama’s neologism Kairosphere, which combines the Greek concept of Kairos—meaning subjective and internal time—with a sphere as a realm that encompasses the invisible, as well as by Morita’s circle works included in the exhibition, the title also references the pendulum-like circular motion made by the two artists with their shoulders and elbows when painting their large works.

Translated by William Andrews