mujô: The Photography and Artistic Practice of Masao Yamamoto
My passion has never been for photography ‘in itself’, but for the possibility – through forgetting yourself – of recording in a fraction of a second the emotion of the subject, and the beauty of the form; that is, a geometry awakened by what is offered.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Below the sky, water;
Deep in the water, brightness!
Stone answers sunlight.
To approach the depth and subtle refinement of Masao Yamamoto’s photographic style, it is useful to take a quick comparative glimpse at the craft and art of a contemporary peer or two with differing approaches to the sensibility of appreciation. For instance, the well–known Takashi Murakami, has shocked the art world with his unconventional approach, merging “high art”, mass-produced culture and commerce, creating life-size sculptures of ultra-sexual, anime-inspired characters and even logo variations for Louis Vuitton. Unlike Yamamoto, he departs consciously from the traditions of Japanese aesthetics, proclaiming: “I do appreciate all different kinds of art, though, just like I appreciate all different kinds of people. There are some people who compete in the commercial arena and there are some who abide by more personal, spiritual or idealistic guidelines. If done well, both can be equally satisfying.” Meanwhile, Zhang Huan, a Chinese artist, seems to join the quest for ‘bigger is better’ by building such overwhelming icons as grossly huge, bronze Buddha limbs; he dabbles as well in the cult of ‘shocking introspection’ by creating sculptures in his own image - but formed of the incense ash from offerings, a material harboring the essence of other peoples dreams.
There may be little question that these two artists’ personal satisfaction stems from another aesthetic and audience than that of Masao Yamamoto. Yamamoto, too, offers an escape, but one from the superlatives modes of expression, modes used by many of his fellow artists that perpetuate the world of advertisement and multi-media interfaces. While others approach their audiences brashly, clapping their hands for attention, Yamamoto exhibits his wares rather like a shy travelling salesman working out of a suitcase, showing us the intimate snapshots from his wallet. His small photographic prints appeal to the memories of the observer and invite the viewer to find personal meaning in them. He invites us to peel our eyes off the brightly colored display screen of much modern multimedia and come and sit with him to gaze out a garden window, go beachcombing, or study the body in repose. He asks us to be still a moment, if we can feel the silence and the tension between dark and light. With such non-assuming technique, Yamamoto merges traditionally proscribed Japanese social forms and cultural aesthetics with contemporary sensibilities.
The primary aesthetic concept at the heart of traditional Japanese culture is the value of harmony in all things. It is based in nature, in the beliefs of refined Shinto-ism, and is concerned with the beauty of studied simplicity and harmony with this nature. It is easy to misconceive her, however, as many of the seeds for Japanese culture came as fragments from China, where ideas of reciprocating natural balances – including familial and social duties - reigned supreme. Morphed under the harsh feudal, clan-based realities of ancient Japan with its animistic beliefs and extreme hierarchal obligations, form was set in lock-step with function, and minimalism was seen as the preferential interface with nature: the least disturbance, the more refinement. When Buddhism eventually came from China to Japan, it too took on a different projection, merging long-held beliefs with the concepts of hopefulness and salvation, self-consciousness and a spiritual path to enlightenment. With startling new aesthetic consequences, ‘The Way’ was applied to the natural world and to an individual’s interaction with it: meditation, understanding, accepting and ‘oneness’ could serve not only as devices for the furtherance of one’s skill or enlightenment, but also as common cultural modes of aesthetic appreciation. These ideas are still expressed in many aspects of daily life and in social rituals, despite the many changes brought about by the westernization of Japanese culture.
Yamamoto's photography delves deeply into this distilled Japanese aesthetic, employing his camera, developing his printing technique (some color but mostly silver gelatin) and tailoring his finishing and exhibition styles to manifest these concepts. Of course, he is not alone in this: “Murakami Takashi has followed the model of [the re-creation of family in an alternative way], with himself as the patriarch of a family of artists. And yet many of these artists”, Ian Buruma writes in Virtual Violence, “show all the signs of deep self-absorption. The world they express is oddly bloodless, indeed a bit slack, in fact rather monstrous, a grotesque world where all sex and violence are unreal. It is certainly interesting to see what is going on in the virtual world of contemporary Japan. That it often looks so pretty makes it all the more disturbing.” For his part, Masao Yamamoto captures suggestive, observational imagery, often in a small, or contained, field of view, to provide the viewer with an experience quite similar to that of reading haiku. His photographs are simple, sometimes disorienting, but they offer a deeper engagement of the work on some emotional or personal level - this is in contrast to works of art by other contemporary artists that can be unapproachable, alienating the viewer through intentional taboo-breaking or by exhibiting fetishized objects in order to disorient through discomfiture or shock. Yamamoto transcends both this and the superficial ‘pretty’ and reaches a deeper, contemplative beauty, closely related to the aesthetics of Japanese tradition.
Biography
Masao Yamamoto was born in 1957 in Gamagori City in the Aichi Prefecture of Honshu, a short way south of the Tokyo-Yokahama industrial megapolis, growing up in a radically and quickly modernizing area of Japan. So far in his life, he has produced more than 1500 artworks, all made with great attention to detail and precise handwork. These earlier artworks often served as part of his "complete, multi-dimensional artwork" installations. Since 1975 he has been a free-lance photographer, and his training as a painter and sculptor is evident in his current practice of photography. Beginning in the early 1990’s, he first created his now widely esteemed "Box of Ku" photographs, showing in Tokyo, San Francisco, New York and Santa Monica. He has since presented other installation shows, such as "Nakazora", "e" and "KAWA = flow".
Japanese Aesthetics
Donald Keene, writing on The Japanese Ideal of Beauty, characterizes Japanese aesthetics to encompass “suggestion, simplicity, and perishability”. The latter is a classical Japanese philosophy that understands the basic reality as constant change, or impermanence (mujô). This concept is in great contrast to Western thought, where permanence is preferred. Traditionally, the arts in Japan have mirrored this fundamental impermanence. Along with impermanence and incompleteness, according to Keene, “but [also] to another variety of irregularity, asymmetry.” He further suggests that “a symmetrical character is considered to be ‘dead’”
Simplicity, the idea of wabi, is an understated beauty, which was first distinguished and praised when expressed in poetry. Simplicity implies that something is a part of the natural world, i.e., it has been ‘touched’ by nature. Rather than perfection, implements with just an imperfection or two are more highly valued. Things that harbor the marks of time, a patina left visible, are cherished. With the act of appreciation, time enters the equation, too. For instance, a flower is more esteemed if it dies slowly, losing only a petal or two at a time, like cherry or plum blossoms, rather than the rose so immortalized through Western romanticism. In wabi, asceticism is not as important but rather moderation.
Another concept, yûgen (profound gaze), may be, among generally recondite Japanese aesthetic ideas, the most ineffable. The term is first found in Chinese philosophical texts, where it has the meaning of “dark,” or “mysterious.” The general feature of East-Asian culture favors allusiveness over explicitness and completeness. The depth of the world is experienced through cultivated imagination. The traditional Japanese use of gold, or jeweled or ornate embellishment, can be understood through the idea of yûgen, where richness is not displayed to catch the eye, but to lure the gaze into meditative thoughts of appreciation.
Yamamoto Experience
The aesthetic choices that Yamamoto makes are very reminiscent of these three fundamentally traditional notions. He considers the process of taking photographs to be a very emotional one, explaining, “If you ran out of film today and tried to come back in similar weather, you might not be able to shoot. You’d be in a different mood. When you feel different, you see things differently.”
His finished prints are quite small (3 x 5 inches and smaller), something the viewer can touch and feel, making the reception of the image extend into the tactile. In an interview Yamamoto argues: “My photographs are small because I want to hold them in my hand. I want them to be objects.” Thus the prints are toned, stained, torn, marked, rubbed and creased, partly through Yamamoto’s work on them and partly with the help of his audience. This marring and tainting of the prints produces an accelerated aging effect: impermanence - an interesting concept in a modern world generally obsessed with agelessness. Exploring his photographs, it becomes clear that there is a manifest timelessness, though many of his images also exude an accompanying piquant nostalgia for the past. They also venture into a provocative stillness somewhere between time and space. Essentially, and often due to their size or scope, his photographs only suggest, never allowing for concrete extrapolations.
Nakazora #1281
This small image, numbered 1281 from the Nakazora collection, 5x3 inches only, impresses with its complexity of composition and content. At first glance, it is difficult to discern what is visible in this photograph. After a second look, the dominantly dark image reveals the delicate fingers of a hand that seem to gently push a quartz stone of similar size. Through the high contrast, the light reflected in the quartz reveals the intricate crystals in the stone while the outline of the fingers forms a wave of light to the edge of the photograph. In the foreground a faint reflection of the stone throws a path of grey to the front that is mirrored in the background, leaving a diagonal patch of textured grey on the left side of the image. This gives the picture depth and dimensionality. That is also perpetuated in the play of light and shadow that the surface of the fingers offers. Above the hand and quartz is darkness, broken up by the faintest little dots of gold paint, making this silver gelatin print a mixed media image. It is a sensual image, playing with shapes and textures, light and shadow, and the innumerable possibilities that each individual viewer might find in the composition.
Formerly, Yamamoto made sculptures/installations where the viewer could choose the display of the artworks by shaking some small box, further calling on the interaction of viewer and his artwork. When arranging his installations, says Yamamoto, it is most difficult for him to choose “where to put the first one. My installation has no beginning. You can start at any print. Where you start is where the story begins. For me, the story grows around the first print installed.”
The subject matter of his images are untouched – innocent landscapes of nature with mountains, flowers, waterfalls, beaches, sea- and landscapes, trees, fogs, hills, stones, animals, and also human forms or shadows of humans. In our daily, rushed lives, Yamamoto photographs the places he travels, and “in every place you go, there are details that most people miss. Many things are happening but we simply don’t notice them. I try to capture them in my photos and bring them home. Then I print them. When I see the printed photograph, a new story presents itself.” These are the simple things that are essential to life, and Yamamoto offers them to the viewer for a re-consideration.
The images are dream-like morphologies of real landscapes, animals or close-ups of human shapes, calling on the observer’s personal imagination and memory. Yamamoto refrains from limiting the viewer’s experience of his works by giving them descriptive titles: he only numbers his images. Through the visual arrangement, the viewer’s personal narrations emerge as the line between past and present is obliterated and the installation becomes a landscape that offers a momentary escape from reality. His photographs are not calling on intellectual concepts; rather, they try to enter the viewer’s subconscious and stimulate the imagination. “The metaphor of ‘images’ as mentally stored visual representations – the metaphorics of actual pictures carried around in our heads -”, Anselm Haverkamp argues, “appear to be most truly illustrated by photographic pictures carried around in our pockets.”
This interactive approach is in opposition to other modes of reception of artworks today, where a museum or gallery experience is often defined by keeping a secure distance from the object of art and an emotional distance is created by this formality. Allowing the viewer to sort through images kept in a box, Yamamoto offers his audience an intimate opportunity to take a look into his very personal collection of images. It’s almost akin to reading a diary, or personal notebook, of sorts: "In the past, when I was a child,” Yamamoto explains, “I collected insects. I have a tendency to collect things. As an adult, instead of killing the insects, I began to take photos of them to collect the images.
Yamamoto himself best interprets his artistic practice, as follows:
When I photograph, I start out with an open mind. If I start out with a precise idea of what I want to photograph, I might miss an interesting event or object. So, I begin with an open mind and try to photograph all kinds of objects.
My photos are small and seem old. In fact, I work so that they’re like that. I could wait 30 years before using them, but that’s impossible. So, I must age them. I take them out with me on walks, I rub them with my hands, this is what gives me my desired expression. This is called the process of forgetting, or the production of memory. Because in old photos the memories are completely manipulated and it’s this that interests me and this is the reason that I do this work.
If I take small photos, it’s because I want to make them into the matter of memories. And it’s for this reason that I think the best format is one that is held in the hollow of the hand. If we can hold the photo in our hand, we can hold a memory in our hand. A little like when we keep a family photo with us. I construct a story by hanging several small photos. I don’t do it chronologically. Sometimes I start with the end, sometimes with the middle, I never know where I will start. I attach one, then another, and then a third. Even I have no idea of the story it tells before I start hanging. It’s only in the theoretic hanging that the sense appears to me.
In fact it’s as if I’m climbing a staircase and at the same time picking up some lovely stones. Even if I had decided to only take the white stones, if I see a black one I like I’ll take it too. It’s the same thing when I’m hanging, the story unfolds in a random way.
For me, a good photo is one that soothes. Makes us feel kind, gentle. A photo that gives us courage, that reminds us of good memories, that makes people happy."
Photograph as Poem
Using the camera to capture suggestive, observational imagery, Yamamoto provides the viewer with an experience quite similar to that of reading haiku, a traditional Japanese form of poem. The power of haiku and of Yamamoto’s work is the power of suggestion, historically typical of Japanese aesthetics. By providing the stimulus and leaving something unsaid or undefined, the viewer is given the chance to complete the idea and thus become part of the work.
A particularly distinctive notion in Japanese aesthetic discourse is that of the “cut” (kire) or, “cut-continuity” (kire-tsuzuki). The kire-tsuzuki is employed through either quick or anticipated juxtaposition of non-sequential, but related, patterns. The linguistically useful concept also appears in the “cut-syllable” (kireji) in the art of haiku poetry, which cuts off one image from—at the same time as it links it to—the next. There is a famous cut-syllable at the end of the first line of the most famous poem by Bashô, perhaps the most famous haiku poet, which reads:
Ah, an ancient pond--
Suddenly a frog jumps in!
The sound of water.
Yamamoto explains: "Long ago, there was a man named Ryokan, who was a calligrapher and a poet. I have an enormous amount of respect for him. In one of his Haikus he describes simply the movement of a leaf trembling as it falls. But in reality, this poem can be interpreted in several ways. For example the falling leaf could be a metaphor for life, the right side up, the bad, and the reverse side, the good. From this simple natural phenomenon he speaks of much deeper things. I find this remarkable. I would like to take these kinds of photos.”
The essence of haiku is its brevity. Beyond the imagistic, metaphorical extrapolations of Masao Yamamoto’s photographs is an acceptance of their brevity combined with an ‘unlimited conciseness’. Within his framing, mysterious darkness and translucent light fight for the confined space.
The result is a haiku-like tension between appearance and understanding, a concept worth exploring further.
Zen-Connection
Zen is a label oft applied to Yamamoto’s photographic works: “When I exhibit my work outside of Japan, people say it reminds them of Zen. I had never thought of that before. As I traveled abroad, I heard more and more people say this. So I decided to read books about Zen.” Yamamoto himself agrees that there is an innate process shared between the two. “I learned that an important element in Zen is ‘active passiveness’. For example in archery, the more you aim at the target, the more the arrow goes away. There’s something similar in the way I shoot. I photograph without having clear purposes.”
It can also be explained by saying, “You are the arrow.” The idea is that the arrow’s point was always intended for it’s destination, note as a notion of fate or destiny, but as a part of a process for which there is truly no beginning or ending. This sense of one-ness between subject and action is essential to the concept of ‘wholeness’ within the world, helping it to evade the extrapolative, nihilistic pitfalls of either determinism or existentialism in Western thought. As usual, this is juxtaposed in the Japanese mind with its opposite component for the very purpose of eventual understanding, that opposite ideal being ‘emptiness’. In addition to his photographic technique, both Yamamoto’s images (with their evocative sense of completeness/incompleteness) and preferred exhibition style (with no beginning or end points) speak to these Zen ideas.
Furthering the argument for a Zen appellation for Yamamoto’s works is a comparison with that most distinctively Japanese style of garden, the “dry landscape” (karesansui), or Zen, garden, a setting for meditation and tranquility. Combining ideas of emptiness with the kire mentioned above, a karesansui garden owes its existence to the dry landscape's being “cut off” from the natural world outside its borders. (The epitome of this style is the rock garden at Ryôanji in Kyoto, where fifteen “mountain”-shaped rocks are set in beds of moss in a rectangular “sea” of white gravel.) Yamamoto’s images may be viewed as moments of ‘isolation within process’, for the assumed or imagined processes that lie outside the borders of his photographs. This, too, is the essence of a Zen garden.
Reaction
Understanding the significance of Japanese aesthetics, traditional culture and artistic, spiritual and philosophic relativity to Masao Yamamoto’s artistic works does a lot to explain them, and speaks to the process to appreciate them, but is does not tell us whether or not we like them. If we do or don’t, these things only tell us part of the ‘why’. One thing we can generally appreciate about Yamamoto, however, is that in the galaxy of photography, he seems to be on a world all his own, where the rules are different, and yet where we instantly feel at home. The viewer naturally orbits the intimacy of these small pictures, often coveting the pseudo-memory they invoke in us. They draw us in. The gravitas of the images far outweighs their size. That such small, brief prints can evoke a strong reaction in us is surprising, and the sustained sensation when viewing an entire grouping or show is startling. Macro-glimpses of the natural world, of living objects and the ephemeral instances of existence, were never more riveting. Accompanying this seductive interest is an incomparable elegance, the result of the photographer entering the process and waiting not to be shown, but to see. Looking at his photographs, we share this vision.
But the viewer also shares a pervasive sadness inseparable from Yamamoto’s images. The fleeting, ‘glimpsed-but-now-gone’ nature of these small photographs instills a lingering nostalgia, with longing, remembrance, desire and regret mingling in the mix. Their worn appearance substantiates our familiarity with the photographs, and as we sift them through our hands or approach the lonely things on the matte expanse of white gallery wall, we feel that they are - like an old photograph in an aunt’s family album or a Polaroid on a friend’s refrigerator door - something we might, if not should, remember. We also covet the way of seeing that is being shown us, even as we remember it. Didn’t we all look at things this way once, with a sense of surprise at the smallest details? Don’t we all carry around the vague outlines of important images from our lives that we can now barely trace? Why does the beautiful invoke the temporary? And why do some of these images seem to await us in the future, obscure but hinting at clarity and understanding? Like all outstanding artists, Masao Yamamoto makes us feel and think in a spiraling ascension of process and appreciation. But uniquely, intimately, we feel like this artist is sitting beside us for a moment, perhaps sipping tea, asking for our stillness as he takes another image from the world.
Stillness. Darkness. Then -
One raindrop escapes heaven.
All that to wake me!
Bibliography:
Buruma, Ian. Virtual Violence (Coursworks)
Cartier-Bresson, Henri. The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers.
(New York: Aperture, 1999)
Clark, John, Some Models in Japanese Art History. (The Burlington Magazine
Publications, Ltd: The Burlington Magazine, December 1986) 881-889
Cooke, Lynne. Contemporary Japanese Art: Some Recent Exhibitions in the United
States. (The Burlington Magazine Publications, Ltd: The Burlington Magazine, June 1991) 385-388
Haverkamp, Anselm. The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on
Photography. (Oregon: Duke University Press, Summer 1993)
Keene, Donald. The Japanese Idea of Beauty. (New York: Wilson Quarterly, 1976)
128-135
Marra, Michele. Japanese Aesthetics: The Construction of Meaning. (University of
Hawai'i Press: Philosophy East and West, July 1995) 367-386
Munsterberg, Hugo. Zen and Art. (College Art Association: Art Journal, Summer
1961) 198-202
Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro. The Philosophy of Zen (University of Hawai'i Press:
Philosophy East and West, July1951) 3-15
Filmography:
Masao Yamamoto - The Space between Flowers (The Joy of Giving Something. Inc,
2006)
Internet Recourses:
http://www.yamamotomasao.jp/index.html
http://www.hackelbury.co.uk/artists/yamamoto/image_library/image_library.html
http://www.lensculture.com/yamamoto.html
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/27/in-focus-the-photographer-masao-yamamoto/
http://www.yanceyrichardson.com/artists/masao-yamamoto/index.html?page=1&work_id=402
http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/17056/takashi-murakami/
http://www.jacksonfineart.com/Masao-Yamamoto-2619.html
Gallery Visit:
YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY
535 West 22nd Street 3rd floor
New York NY 10011
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Below the sky, water;
Deep in the water, brightness!
Stone answers sunlight.
To approach the depth and subtle refinement of Masao Yamamoto’s photographic style, it is useful to take a quick comparative glimpse at the craft and art of a contemporary peer or two with differing approaches to the sensibility of appreciation. For instance, the well–known Takashi Murakami, has shocked the art world with his unconventional approach, merging “high art”, mass-produced culture and commerce, creating life-size sculptures of ultra-sexual, anime-inspired characters and even logo variations for Louis Vuitton. Unlike Yamamoto, he departs consciously from the traditions of Japanese aesthetics, proclaiming: “I do appreciate all different kinds of art, though, just like I appreciate all different kinds of people. There are some people who compete in the commercial arena and there are some who abide by more personal, spiritual or idealistic guidelines. If done well, both can be equally satisfying.” Meanwhile, Zhang Huan, a Chinese artist, seems to join the quest for ‘bigger is better’ by building such overwhelming icons as grossly huge, bronze Buddha limbs; he dabbles as well in the cult of ‘shocking introspection’ by creating sculptures in his own image - but formed of the incense ash from offerings, a material harboring the essence of other peoples dreams.
There may be little question that these two artists’ personal satisfaction stems from another aesthetic and audience than that of Masao Yamamoto. Yamamoto, too, offers an escape, but one from the superlatives modes of expression, modes used by many of his fellow artists that perpetuate the world of advertisement and multi-media interfaces. While others approach their audiences brashly, clapping their hands for attention, Yamamoto exhibits his wares rather like a shy travelling salesman working out of a suitcase, showing us the intimate snapshots from his wallet. His small photographic prints appeal to the memories of the observer and invite the viewer to find personal meaning in them. He invites us to peel our eyes off the brightly colored display screen of much modern multimedia and come and sit with him to gaze out a garden window, go beachcombing, or study the body in repose. He asks us to be still a moment, if we can feel the silence and the tension between dark and light. With such non-assuming technique, Yamamoto merges traditionally proscribed Japanese social forms and cultural aesthetics with contemporary sensibilities.
The primary aesthetic concept at the heart of traditional Japanese culture is the value of harmony in all things. It is based in nature, in the beliefs of refined Shinto-ism, and is concerned with the beauty of studied simplicity and harmony with this nature. It is easy to misconceive her, however, as many of the seeds for Japanese culture came as fragments from China, where ideas of reciprocating natural balances – including familial and social duties - reigned supreme. Morphed under the harsh feudal, clan-based realities of ancient Japan with its animistic beliefs and extreme hierarchal obligations, form was set in lock-step with function, and minimalism was seen as the preferential interface with nature: the least disturbance, the more refinement. When Buddhism eventually came from China to Japan, it too took on a different projection, merging long-held beliefs with the concepts of hopefulness and salvation, self-consciousness and a spiritual path to enlightenment. With startling new aesthetic consequences, ‘The Way’ was applied to the natural world and to an individual’s interaction with it: meditation, understanding, accepting and ‘oneness’ could serve not only as devices for the furtherance of one’s skill or enlightenment, but also as common cultural modes of aesthetic appreciation. These ideas are still expressed in many aspects of daily life and in social rituals, despite the many changes brought about by the westernization of Japanese culture.
Yamamoto's photography delves deeply into this distilled Japanese aesthetic, employing his camera, developing his printing technique (some color but mostly silver gelatin) and tailoring his finishing and exhibition styles to manifest these concepts. Of course, he is not alone in this: “Murakami Takashi has followed the model of [the re-creation of family in an alternative way], with himself as the patriarch of a family of artists. And yet many of these artists”, Ian Buruma writes in Virtual Violence, “show all the signs of deep self-absorption. The world they express is oddly bloodless, indeed a bit slack, in fact rather monstrous, a grotesque world where all sex and violence are unreal. It is certainly interesting to see what is going on in the virtual world of contemporary Japan. That it often looks so pretty makes it all the more disturbing.” For his part, Masao Yamamoto captures suggestive, observational imagery, often in a small, or contained, field of view, to provide the viewer with an experience quite similar to that of reading haiku. His photographs are simple, sometimes disorienting, but they offer a deeper engagement of the work on some emotional or personal level - this is in contrast to works of art by other contemporary artists that can be unapproachable, alienating the viewer through intentional taboo-breaking or by exhibiting fetishized objects in order to disorient through discomfiture or shock. Yamamoto transcends both this and the superficial ‘pretty’ and reaches a deeper, contemplative beauty, closely related to the aesthetics of Japanese tradition.
Biography
Masao Yamamoto was born in 1957 in Gamagori City in the Aichi Prefecture of Honshu, a short way south of the Tokyo-Yokahama industrial megapolis, growing up in a radically and quickly modernizing area of Japan. So far in his life, he has produced more than 1500 artworks, all made with great attention to detail and precise handwork. These earlier artworks often served as part of his "complete, multi-dimensional artwork" installations. Since 1975 he has been a free-lance photographer, and his training as a painter and sculptor is evident in his current practice of photography. Beginning in the early 1990’s, he first created his now widely esteemed "Box of Ku" photographs, showing in Tokyo, San Francisco, New York and Santa Monica. He has since presented other installation shows, such as "Nakazora", "e" and "KAWA = flow".
Japanese Aesthetics
Donald Keene, writing on The Japanese Ideal of Beauty, characterizes Japanese aesthetics to encompass “suggestion, simplicity, and perishability”. The latter is a classical Japanese philosophy that understands the basic reality as constant change, or impermanence (mujô). This concept is in great contrast to Western thought, where permanence is preferred. Traditionally, the arts in Japan have mirrored this fundamental impermanence. Along with impermanence and incompleteness, according to Keene, “but [also] to another variety of irregularity, asymmetry.” He further suggests that “a symmetrical character is considered to be ‘dead’”
Simplicity, the idea of wabi, is an understated beauty, which was first distinguished and praised when expressed in poetry. Simplicity implies that something is a part of the natural world, i.e., it has been ‘touched’ by nature. Rather than perfection, implements with just an imperfection or two are more highly valued. Things that harbor the marks of time, a patina left visible, are cherished. With the act of appreciation, time enters the equation, too. For instance, a flower is more esteemed if it dies slowly, losing only a petal or two at a time, like cherry or plum blossoms, rather than the rose so immortalized through Western romanticism. In wabi, asceticism is not as important but rather moderation.
Another concept, yûgen (profound gaze), may be, among generally recondite Japanese aesthetic ideas, the most ineffable. The term is first found in Chinese philosophical texts, where it has the meaning of “dark,” or “mysterious.” The general feature of East-Asian culture favors allusiveness over explicitness and completeness. The depth of the world is experienced through cultivated imagination. The traditional Japanese use of gold, or jeweled or ornate embellishment, can be understood through the idea of yûgen, where richness is not displayed to catch the eye, but to lure the gaze into meditative thoughts of appreciation.
Yamamoto Experience
The aesthetic choices that Yamamoto makes are very reminiscent of these three fundamentally traditional notions. He considers the process of taking photographs to be a very emotional one, explaining, “If you ran out of film today and tried to come back in similar weather, you might not be able to shoot. You’d be in a different mood. When you feel different, you see things differently.”
His finished prints are quite small (3 x 5 inches and smaller), something the viewer can touch and feel, making the reception of the image extend into the tactile. In an interview Yamamoto argues: “My photographs are small because I want to hold them in my hand. I want them to be objects.” Thus the prints are toned, stained, torn, marked, rubbed and creased, partly through Yamamoto’s work on them and partly with the help of his audience. This marring and tainting of the prints produces an accelerated aging effect: impermanence - an interesting concept in a modern world generally obsessed with agelessness. Exploring his photographs, it becomes clear that there is a manifest timelessness, though many of his images also exude an accompanying piquant nostalgia for the past. They also venture into a provocative stillness somewhere between time and space. Essentially, and often due to their size or scope, his photographs only suggest, never allowing for concrete extrapolations.
Nakazora #1281
This small image, numbered 1281 from the Nakazora collection, 5x3 inches only, impresses with its complexity of composition and content. At first glance, it is difficult to discern what is visible in this photograph. After a second look, the dominantly dark image reveals the delicate fingers of a hand that seem to gently push a quartz stone of similar size. Through the high contrast, the light reflected in the quartz reveals the intricate crystals in the stone while the outline of the fingers forms a wave of light to the edge of the photograph. In the foreground a faint reflection of the stone throws a path of grey to the front that is mirrored in the background, leaving a diagonal patch of textured grey on the left side of the image. This gives the picture depth and dimensionality. That is also perpetuated in the play of light and shadow that the surface of the fingers offers. Above the hand and quartz is darkness, broken up by the faintest little dots of gold paint, making this silver gelatin print a mixed media image. It is a sensual image, playing with shapes and textures, light and shadow, and the innumerable possibilities that each individual viewer might find in the composition.
Formerly, Yamamoto made sculptures/installations where the viewer could choose the display of the artworks by shaking some small box, further calling on the interaction of viewer and his artwork. When arranging his installations, says Yamamoto, it is most difficult for him to choose “where to put the first one. My installation has no beginning. You can start at any print. Where you start is where the story begins. For me, the story grows around the first print installed.”
The subject matter of his images are untouched – innocent landscapes of nature with mountains, flowers, waterfalls, beaches, sea- and landscapes, trees, fogs, hills, stones, animals, and also human forms or shadows of humans. In our daily, rushed lives, Yamamoto photographs the places he travels, and “in every place you go, there are details that most people miss. Many things are happening but we simply don’t notice them. I try to capture them in my photos and bring them home. Then I print them. When I see the printed photograph, a new story presents itself.” These are the simple things that are essential to life, and Yamamoto offers them to the viewer for a re-consideration.
The images are dream-like morphologies of real landscapes, animals or close-ups of human shapes, calling on the observer’s personal imagination and memory. Yamamoto refrains from limiting the viewer’s experience of his works by giving them descriptive titles: he only numbers his images. Through the visual arrangement, the viewer’s personal narrations emerge as the line between past and present is obliterated and the installation becomes a landscape that offers a momentary escape from reality. His photographs are not calling on intellectual concepts; rather, they try to enter the viewer’s subconscious and stimulate the imagination. “The metaphor of ‘images’ as mentally stored visual representations – the metaphorics of actual pictures carried around in our heads -”, Anselm Haverkamp argues, “appear to be most truly illustrated by photographic pictures carried around in our pockets.”
This interactive approach is in opposition to other modes of reception of artworks today, where a museum or gallery experience is often defined by keeping a secure distance from the object of art and an emotional distance is created by this formality. Allowing the viewer to sort through images kept in a box, Yamamoto offers his audience an intimate opportunity to take a look into his very personal collection of images. It’s almost akin to reading a diary, or personal notebook, of sorts: "In the past, when I was a child,” Yamamoto explains, “I collected insects. I have a tendency to collect things. As an adult, instead of killing the insects, I began to take photos of them to collect the images.
Yamamoto himself best interprets his artistic practice, as follows:
When I photograph, I start out with an open mind. If I start out with a precise idea of what I want to photograph, I might miss an interesting event or object. So, I begin with an open mind and try to photograph all kinds of objects.
My photos are small and seem old. In fact, I work so that they’re like that. I could wait 30 years before using them, but that’s impossible. So, I must age them. I take them out with me on walks, I rub them with my hands, this is what gives me my desired expression. This is called the process of forgetting, or the production of memory. Because in old photos the memories are completely manipulated and it’s this that interests me and this is the reason that I do this work.
If I take small photos, it’s because I want to make them into the matter of memories. And it’s for this reason that I think the best format is one that is held in the hollow of the hand. If we can hold the photo in our hand, we can hold a memory in our hand. A little like when we keep a family photo with us. I construct a story by hanging several small photos. I don’t do it chronologically. Sometimes I start with the end, sometimes with the middle, I never know where I will start. I attach one, then another, and then a third. Even I have no idea of the story it tells before I start hanging. It’s only in the theoretic hanging that the sense appears to me.
In fact it’s as if I’m climbing a staircase and at the same time picking up some lovely stones. Even if I had decided to only take the white stones, if I see a black one I like I’ll take it too. It’s the same thing when I’m hanging, the story unfolds in a random way.
For me, a good photo is one that soothes. Makes us feel kind, gentle. A photo that gives us courage, that reminds us of good memories, that makes people happy."
Photograph as Poem
Using the camera to capture suggestive, observational imagery, Yamamoto provides the viewer with an experience quite similar to that of reading haiku, a traditional Japanese form of poem. The power of haiku and of Yamamoto’s work is the power of suggestion, historically typical of Japanese aesthetics. By providing the stimulus and leaving something unsaid or undefined, the viewer is given the chance to complete the idea and thus become part of the work.
A particularly distinctive notion in Japanese aesthetic discourse is that of the “cut” (kire) or, “cut-continuity” (kire-tsuzuki). The kire-tsuzuki is employed through either quick or anticipated juxtaposition of non-sequential, but related, patterns. The linguistically useful concept also appears in the “cut-syllable” (kireji) in the art of haiku poetry, which cuts off one image from—at the same time as it links it to—the next. There is a famous cut-syllable at the end of the first line of the most famous poem by Bashô, perhaps the most famous haiku poet, which reads:
Ah, an ancient pond--
Suddenly a frog jumps in!
The sound of water.
Yamamoto explains: "Long ago, there was a man named Ryokan, who was a calligrapher and a poet. I have an enormous amount of respect for him. In one of his Haikus he describes simply the movement of a leaf trembling as it falls. But in reality, this poem can be interpreted in several ways. For example the falling leaf could be a metaphor for life, the right side up, the bad, and the reverse side, the good. From this simple natural phenomenon he speaks of much deeper things. I find this remarkable. I would like to take these kinds of photos.”
The essence of haiku is its brevity. Beyond the imagistic, metaphorical extrapolations of Masao Yamamoto’s photographs is an acceptance of their brevity combined with an ‘unlimited conciseness’. Within his framing, mysterious darkness and translucent light fight for the confined space.
The result is a haiku-like tension between appearance and understanding, a concept worth exploring further.
Zen-Connection
Zen is a label oft applied to Yamamoto’s photographic works: “When I exhibit my work outside of Japan, people say it reminds them of Zen. I had never thought of that before. As I traveled abroad, I heard more and more people say this. So I decided to read books about Zen.” Yamamoto himself agrees that there is an innate process shared between the two. “I learned that an important element in Zen is ‘active passiveness’. For example in archery, the more you aim at the target, the more the arrow goes away. There’s something similar in the way I shoot. I photograph without having clear purposes.”
It can also be explained by saying, “You are the arrow.” The idea is that the arrow’s point was always intended for it’s destination, note as a notion of fate or destiny, but as a part of a process for which there is truly no beginning or ending. This sense of one-ness between subject and action is essential to the concept of ‘wholeness’ within the world, helping it to evade the extrapolative, nihilistic pitfalls of either determinism or existentialism in Western thought. As usual, this is juxtaposed in the Japanese mind with its opposite component for the very purpose of eventual understanding, that opposite ideal being ‘emptiness’. In addition to his photographic technique, both Yamamoto’s images (with their evocative sense of completeness/incompleteness) and preferred exhibition style (with no beginning or end points) speak to these Zen ideas.
Furthering the argument for a Zen appellation for Yamamoto’s works is a comparison with that most distinctively Japanese style of garden, the “dry landscape” (karesansui), or Zen, garden, a setting for meditation and tranquility. Combining ideas of emptiness with the kire mentioned above, a karesansui garden owes its existence to the dry landscape's being “cut off” from the natural world outside its borders. (The epitome of this style is the rock garden at Ryôanji in Kyoto, where fifteen “mountain”-shaped rocks are set in beds of moss in a rectangular “sea” of white gravel.) Yamamoto’s images may be viewed as moments of ‘isolation within process’, for the assumed or imagined processes that lie outside the borders of his photographs. This, too, is the essence of a Zen garden.
Reaction
Understanding the significance of Japanese aesthetics, traditional culture and artistic, spiritual and philosophic relativity to Masao Yamamoto’s artistic works does a lot to explain them, and speaks to the process to appreciate them, but is does not tell us whether or not we like them. If we do or don’t, these things only tell us part of the ‘why’. One thing we can generally appreciate about Yamamoto, however, is that in the galaxy of photography, he seems to be on a world all his own, where the rules are different, and yet where we instantly feel at home. The viewer naturally orbits the intimacy of these small pictures, often coveting the pseudo-memory they invoke in us. They draw us in. The gravitas of the images far outweighs their size. That such small, brief prints can evoke a strong reaction in us is surprising, and the sustained sensation when viewing an entire grouping or show is startling. Macro-glimpses of the natural world, of living objects and the ephemeral instances of existence, were never more riveting. Accompanying this seductive interest is an incomparable elegance, the result of the photographer entering the process and waiting not to be shown, but to see. Looking at his photographs, we share this vision.
But the viewer also shares a pervasive sadness inseparable from Yamamoto’s images. The fleeting, ‘glimpsed-but-now-gone’ nature of these small photographs instills a lingering nostalgia, with longing, remembrance, desire and regret mingling in the mix. Their worn appearance substantiates our familiarity with the photographs, and as we sift them through our hands or approach the lonely things on the matte expanse of white gallery wall, we feel that they are - like an old photograph in an aunt’s family album or a Polaroid on a friend’s refrigerator door - something we might, if not should, remember. We also covet the way of seeing that is being shown us, even as we remember it. Didn’t we all look at things this way once, with a sense of surprise at the smallest details? Don’t we all carry around the vague outlines of important images from our lives that we can now barely trace? Why does the beautiful invoke the temporary? And why do some of these images seem to await us in the future, obscure but hinting at clarity and understanding? Like all outstanding artists, Masao Yamamoto makes us feel and think in a spiraling ascension of process and appreciation. But uniquely, intimately, we feel like this artist is sitting beside us for a moment, perhaps sipping tea, asking for our stillness as he takes another image from the world.
Stillness. Darkness. Then -
One raindrop escapes heaven.
All that to wake me!
Bibliography:
Buruma, Ian. Virtual Violence (Coursworks)
Cartier-Bresson, Henri. The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers.
(New York: Aperture, 1999)
Clark, John, Some Models in Japanese Art History. (The Burlington Magazine
Publications, Ltd: The Burlington Magazine, December 1986) 881-889
Cooke, Lynne. Contemporary Japanese Art: Some Recent Exhibitions in the United
States. (The Burlington Magazine Publications, Ltd: The Burlington Magazine, June 1991) 385-388
Haverkamp, Anselm. The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on
Photography. (Oregon: Duke University Press, Summer 1993)
Keene, Donald. The Japanese Idea of Beauty. (New York: Wilson Quarterly, 1976)
128-135
Marra, Michele. Japanese Aesthetics: The Construction of Meaning. (University of
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Munsterberg, Hugo. Zen and Art. (College Art Association: Art Journal, Summer
1961) 198-202
Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro. The Philosophy of Zen (University of Hawai'i Press:
Philosophy East and West, July1951) 3-15
Filmography:
Masao Yamamoto - The Space between Flowers (The Joy of Giving Something. Inc,
2006)
Internet Recourses:
http://www.yamamotomasao.jp/index.html
http://www.hackelbury.co.uk/artists/yamamoto/image_library/image_library.html
http://www.lensculture.com/yamamoto.html
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/27/in-focus-the-photographer-masao-yamamoto/
http://www.yanceyrichardson.com/artists/masao-yamamoto/index.html?page=1&work_id=402
http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/17056/takashi-murakami/
http://www.jacksonfineart.com/Masao-Yamamoto-2619.html
Gallery Visit:
YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY
535 West 22nd Street 3rd floor
New York NY 10011