National Foundation Day at the Museum
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.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home