Rising Tokyo artist's 'psychic tsunami'
Just like the tsunami that struck that day and which threw buildings together and left vast areas littered with the bric-a-brac of everyday life, Kumazawa’s pictures also bring together the familiar elements and detritus that make up the dense texture of life in Japan in surreal and chaotic amalgams.
The main difference is that the young artist’s pictorial tsunami are full of life, wit and comment on various aspects of everyday existence in Japan.
In our society, schoolgirls are the most exploited individuals.
Kumazawa, 28, creates her potent images with disarmingly humble methods -- namely, the simple pencil on expansive paper panels. But less is more, as the diminutive artist revealed when she spoke to CNNGo recently at the Mizuma Gallery in downtown Tokyo.
Surreal mash-ups
“I like using pencil because I don’t really understand what colors will look good in different places,” she humbly explains. “I just can’t manage to put everything together and have a good balance when I’m using color.”
Pencil enables her to get precision, accuracy and a sense of reality into her work -- something that makes her surrealist mash-ups all the more convincing and believable in the same way that dreams are believable at the moment they are happening.
In “Erosion,” a work that was shown recently at the Zipangu group exhibition in Tokyo, sailor-suited high school girls are shown liberally sprinkled into a heaving mass of objects that we are unable to take in all at once.
As our eye roves over the finely detailed surface of this sprawling work, we pick out such objects as a graffiti-covered post box, a broken traffic cone, a teddy bear and a condom vending machine.
The name of the piece, “Erosion,” is a pun on "eros" and refers to the loss of innocence of high school girls through such phenomena as enjo-kosai (compensated dating).
“In our society, schoolgirls are the most exploited individuals,” the artist says, unwittingly sounding like a radical feminist, something she is quick to deny.
“I often feature women in my art simply because I’m one and I use my friends as models. When I was drawing this work I was in a very low mood, thinking about all the meanness in the world. The girls, becoming adults by losing their purity became an expression of that.”
Bikini sushi
In another work, “Kaiten Zushi” (Rotary Sushi Shop), the dishes of sushi have been replaced by various types of tiny women, some in bikinis or kimono; others in maid uniforms or office wear.
They patiently wait to be selected by the male clientele, while one or two dangle from chopsticks.
Despite its light-hearted absurdity, Kumazawa’s painstaking pencil work and her mastery of gradation and tone gives this work an element of photorealism. But oddly, the way it depicts the relations between the sexes is actually the truest thing about it.
Now three years into her career as an artist -- she graduated from Musashino Art University with a Master’s degree in 2008 -- she is well on the path to gaining the wider recognition she deserves.
Characteristically Japanese?
Two years ago she won the “Hisho” Setagaya Art Award and had her work exhibited at the public Setagaya Art Museum’s Citizen’s Gallery. This year she got an “honorable mention” at VOCA 2011, a showcase for rising artists at the Ueno Royal Museum.
She is also being promoted by the Mizuma Art Gallery, which has an enviable track record in finding distinctive young Japanese artists and raising their profile.
Her inclusion in the recent Zipangu exhibition, which looked at art with a strong Japanese character, was part of this. But just how Japanese is her art?
There is no denying the subject matter is Japanese, but Kumazawa claims her work is dominated by Japanese themes simply because she has lived and worked here.
“I’m very interested in drawing other countries’ people and scenery,” she says. “In fact, my first pencil work, ‘Maru Maru Play,’ used New York landmarks like the Chrysler Building, but all the mothers and children in the picture are Japanese. That’s simply because I couldn’t find any non-Japanese models.”
Whether she starts to use non-Japanese models or not, I suspect Kumazawa’s work will continue to have the decentered intensity that is its hallmark -- and coincidentally just happens to be one of the key characteristics of Japanese art and society.
