National Foundation Day at the Museum

It's been a pretty slow week since the Valentine's Day party on Monday. I've been working on applications a bit and the biggest excitement of the week came when I secured a heater for my classroom. It's supposed to start getting warmer now, but I don't care. It's the principle that counts and will benefit the person after me!

At work, we also hosted several speakers from the Takasago International Association on Tuesday and yesterday was National Foundation Day, so we all had the day off for the public holiday.

I still had Japanese class on Tuesday night, but I spent the free holiday biking from Amagasaki to Osaka with a group of friends and going to see an exhibition at the National Museum of International Art titled "The Concrete Poetry of Niikuni Seiichi".

The exhibition was wonderful. This artist, Niikuni Seiichi, essentially used kanji and words to create artistic pictures, but embeds messages and meaning within the words. While some of the images have more obvious messages, other are like riddles or a game of Pictionary and take time to figure out.

Here are several examples (click to enlarge):

I won't explain all of these, but you do need some background understanding of characters (kanji) to understand the meaning of some of these pieces. The next one, for example involves two kanji, 川 (kawa, or river) and 州 (shu, or state). Strikingly similar, Seiichi combines the two words to form a visual embankment between water and land - literally consisting of the words themselves:

The word 触る (sawaru, or touch) consists of the main kanji and one character from the hiragana alphabet (る). I interpreted this piece as showing what happens when you smack something or as showing how molecules spread when you touch another surface. I can't tell what the small kanji in the upper left-hand corner means, however, and I am sure it is relevant - I could be wrong:

雨 is the kanji for rain:

Finally, I really like the tatami-themed picture on the lower right. Tatami are the bamboo-grass floors found in most Japanese homes. The picture is laid out in the way a standard tatami room would be laid out. The main flats of the picture consist of the kanji for tatami, while the other kanji - seen in the middle of the open space - is the word for a fire hole (for hot water, used for traditional tea ceremonies, etc). Pretty cool, huh?:

This form of art saw some popularity in the 1960s, but Seiichi's popularity faded and his work essentially went into obscurity after his premature death in the 1970s. I tried to do a little research on the artist and talked to several coworkers about the exhibit earlier today, but was stunned by a) how little information is available on the web about Niikuni Seiichi and his work (especially in English but also in Japanese) and b) that my coworkers weren't familiar with the work at all.

I really recommend visiting the exhibit if you are in the Osaka-area.

More on the Concrete Poetry movement, from the NMAO website:

As part of the wave of modernism that swept over all fields of art in the 20th century, poets boldly began to analyze language structurally instead of merely concentrating on its semantic content. Among these writers, some began to approach their work with a special emphasis on its visual and phonetic aspects.

In Japan, Niikuni Seiichi (1925−77) was the foremost figure in this movement, but fell into virtual oblivion after his death. Niikuni, who began conducting avant-garde experiments in poetry in his hometown of Sendai in the 1950s, arrived at a poetry that dealt with language in terms of both its visual and aural elements. After producing "seeing poems," in which kanji (Chinese characters) were scattered around the page to form graphic images, and "listening poems," consisting of hiragana, katakana, and numbers, Niikuni's work came to fruition following a move to Tokyo and the publication of his poetry collection "Zero on". In Tokyo, the poet discovered "concrete poetry," an international movement of poets who arranged various written elements into "constellation"-like forms. Not long after, Niikuni came up with the unique method of repeating kanji in a grid pattern in poems such as "Ame" (Rain), and received acclaim both in and outside of Japan. During his years in Tokyo, he formed alliances with foreign poets as the leading figure in Japanese concrete poetry, and published countless poems in the official journal of the ASA (Association for Study of Arts), a group which he also founded, and showed his work at exhibitions throughout the world. Though he was fond of using kanji that were related to the body, such as "lip" and "blood," and life and death, there was also another side to Niikuni. He had studied contemporary music and deserves to be recognized for his ingenuity in recording sound poetry prior to his involvement in this global poetry movement. In this exhibition, we reexamine the work of Niikuni Seiichi, a poet who not only evolved a Japanese version of concrete poetry but opened up a unique world that unexpected took root in the cultural climate of foreign countries. Based on a survey of extant documents, this event should provide an important opportunity to reconsider the interactive relationship between art, music, and poetry.