A pioneer of the sōsaku-hanga (“creative prints”) movement as well as in abstract painting in Japan, Onchi Kōshirō, was said to have gathered bits of trees and junk he picked up from streets and vacant lots in a wooden box and sometimes played with them, calling them “Hima-no-Otsukiai[1]”. Shortly after the war, he began improvising with these objects and printing their various compositions on paper. Later on, this method of printmaking without engraving was called multi-block printing. Around the same time, he left behind a different work from his prints, also called “Hima-no-Otsukiai”. This work, combining trees, stones, triangles, circles, and contrasting elements, invokes familiar images in our minds. In this exhibition, we positioned Onchi Kōshirō’s “Title Unknown” (c.1949) as a starting point, an “angelic” work seemingly appearing from the rubble of war, and invited two artists in conversation, Shoko Masunaga and Yaya Ueda, whose works similarly resonate with his process of creating images. In our world today, in which we are flooded by a tidal wave of images, their works will surely guide us as to how we can relearn the active act of “seeing”.

Onchi considered the woodblock print, created by layering prints, to be the most “compositional process” in painting. This was because expressing different ideas and scenes in a single picture could be done by simply printing them on separate woodblock plates and combining them on paper, without having to mix colors on one surface.

Yaya Ueda, who also studied printmaking, employs a variety of media to investigate the integration of disparate worlds. Her most important tool is a camera she refers to as “Metal Glue (metallic adhesive).” While photography captures the moment within the existence of a fragile three-dimensional object, Ueda aims to capture the relationship between its visual components, not only in terms of their movements dictated by gravity but also in relation to other physical objects emphasized by the medium of the photograph; in other words, she is attempting to capture something that can only exist in an image.

Shoko Masunaga’s paintings have a plasticity and dynamism to them as if they are suspended in time. The artist incorporates a variety of colors that change subtly depending on the viewer’s psychology and environment, lines with various properties and origins, and, at times, reversals of the paintings’ structures or motifs, as well as the back and front, while leaving traces of these processes of exchange. Masunaga’s decisions and hand gestures, as well as the sensory responses she receives from the materials, convey the complexity and richness of the visual experience.

Through playing hand games with the fragile junk of the chaotic postwar period, Onchi Kōshirō put his trust in the manifestation of an angel. Its presence, as a messenger from the invisible world, may have appeared to help put together the world that had fallen apart. This exhibition will touch on and inform viewers about this fundamental subject: How do we call a simple assortment of materials a work of art and are then compelled to share it with each other?

[1] “Hima-no-Otsukiai” roughly translates to “Free time Companions”