Japan Times: Women of quiet strength

Friday, Sept. 24, 2010

Women of quiet strength The subtle power of feminine beauty roars from the canvases of Shoen Uemura

By JEFF MICHAEL HAMMOND
Special to The Japan Times

Female artists play a significant role in Japan's art world today, but a century ago, only a few women made a mark in the then male-dominated field. Shoen Uemura stands out as one of the most successful, a status she earned through the relentless study and perfection of her chosen theme of bijin-ga — pictures of beautiful women.

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Lady in color: "Sound of the Tabor" (1938) from a private collection COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF ART, TOKYO

"Uemura Shoen," at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, revisits the artist's career by showing around 90 paintings, which are complemented by more than 30 rarely exhibited sketches.

Uemura was born as Tsune Uemura in 1875. Her father having died just two months earlier, she was brought up by her mother, who ran a Kyoto tea shop. While her mother served the customers, the young Uemura drew pictures in a corner of the shop.

Even before she began formal art training at age 12, her pictures had earned her a reputation among the shop's customers. By age 15, she was exhibiting her work and went on to win not only awards in official art contests but also commissions from private patrons.

Though the subjects of bijin-ga woodblock prints were usually courtesans, Uemura portrayed ordinary women, either dressed up to go out or pictured in private, domestic moments.

She also painted a number of pictures inspired by female characters in noh theater. Such roles were usually performed by men, but Uemura had women recreate the poses for her works. The model for one of her best-known of these works, the impressively large "Jo-No-Mai," is said to have been her daughter-in-law, who poses in a confident and dignified manner, her vivid orange kimono dissolving into a luminous cloud pattern at the hem.

The majority of Uemura's work, however, shows women out and about in all their finery. Again, her great care in color choice for the kimono and obi and her attention to the design and texture of different fabrics give such works a charged vibrancy.

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Seasonal elegance: "Springtime of Life (Bride)" (1899) COURTESY OF MEITO ART MUSEUM COURTESY OF MEITO ART MUSEUM

In "Snowflakes" (1944), Uemura positions the figures of two women in the bottom left corner and leaves the rest of the frame empty, apart for the occasional snowflake, to suggest depth. This uncluttered background — common to most of her pictures — allows the figures to stand out all the more. The parasols are rendered as broad, flat shapes in muted hues, so as not to distract from the faces of the women and the vivid coloring of their kimono.

Uemura took great delight in portraying women in different outfits accentuating the seasons of the year, be it a leisurely spring stroll or a battle against elements. In the humid summer months, the season is alluded to by a fan held by the main figure or through another motif within the picture, as in "Firefly" (1944) — the tiny insect being a harbinger of early summer. In "Women Walking Against a Snowstorm" (1911), two young ladies are hit by a strong gust of wind, and Uemura captures the flowing shape of the wind-swept garments with highly expressive outlines in ink — a rather rare example of dramatic action in her work.

One curatorial coup of the exhibition is its coupling of two works, similar in theme or composition, to facilitate comparison. This comes into play in a pair of paintings titled "Sound of the Tabor." Uemura first sketched her compositions on large paper sheets called shita-zu. Placed under the paper to be painted on, they allowed the outlines to be easily copied later to execute variations on a composition. The two paintings depict a rich merchant's daughter the moment after she hits a handheld drum. There is nothing wrong with the first painting, completed in 1938, but one can see why Uemura returned to it in 1940. The later version has a more satisfactory color balance, which brings the composition to life.

In "Listening to the Songs of Autumn Insects" (1907), a young lady in a purple-blue kimono and orange obi peeps out from behind a bamboo screen. The parts of her figure shown through the screen are rendered in subdued tones, emphasizing depth and atmosphere. The artist exaggerates the same effect in "Yang Guifei," which marked a comeback after a slump in her career that lasted several years. A maid fixing the hair of the famed consort to the seventh Emperor of the Tang Dynasty is shown faintly from behind a paper screen, which allows full attention to be paid to the clear and vivid beauty of her mistress.

Uemura was working at a time when Japanese art was going through a period of questioning and some great upheavals. While many artists began producing Western-influenced oil paintings, Uemura stuck to iwaenogu (mineral pigments) and Japanese themes. She strove to invoke dignity in her beautiful women, but a certain distance from her subjects also invited charges that her women resembled porcelain dolls rather than beings of flesh and blood.

This criticism is perhaps valid, though in numerous pictures Uemura succeeded in expressing feelings of quiet strength and other emotions, albeit in her own delicate manner. Toward the end of her life she depicted some of her childhood memories of her mother. In one graceful work from 1943, for example, her mother is seen fixing the paper on shoji doors; in another she threads a needle by the light of the fading evening sky.

Uemura died of cancer in 1949, one year after becoming the first woman to be awarded the Order of Culture.
"Uemura Shoen" at The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo runs till Oct. 17; admission ¥1,300; open daily 10 a.m.-5 p.m. (Fri. till 8 p.m.). For more information, visit www.momat.go.jp/english/artmuseum/ index.html.

Japan Times: Talented Women of Kyoto

Friday, July 16, 2010

The talented women of Kyoto

By MATTHEW LARKING

Special to The Japan Times

"Women Artists of Kyoto: Bearing Burdens / Burdens Born" is ostensibly about the classification of female artists since the late 19th century. The term "keishu-gaka" refers to accomplished women artists, "joryu-gaka" to post-World War II artists who created trends among male colleagues and "josei-gaka" simply emphasizes the feminine gender of an artist.

Images of womanhood: Hisako Kajiwara's "Sisters" (c. 1916). COURTESY OF THE KYOTO MUNICIPAL MUSEUM OF ART

Distinguishing between male and female interpretations of art has been historically important in Japan, and remains so. In the 1990s, the critic Kotaro Iizawa gave the name "onnanoko shashinka" (girl photographers) to an emergent generation of female artists with a penchant for taking brightly-colored photographs of everyday and intimate scenes.

The visual thrust of this exhibition, however, concerns the larger theme of the way female artists have represented women in accord with their times. The exhibition begins with idealized depictions of femininity that were the requisite of late 19th-century female artists and progresses to further psychologically and aesthetically complex portrayals of womanhood. All the works are nihonga (Japanese-style painting), as yoga (Western-style painting) was considered a masculine domain, periodically castigated for its immoral subject of the nude, which is brought under scrutiny in a final section of the show.

Shoen Uemura (1875-1949), the archetypal keishu-gaka, depicts an elegant femininity in "A Fine Day" (1941), where a woman handles a piece of cloth. Special attention is given to the hairstyle and kimono — distinctive markers of the woman's high social class, and stylistically suggestive of an Edo Period (1603-1968) inheritance.

Uemura was perhaps the most important female painter of her day, and her status and wealth were commensurate with her male contemporaries. Her focus was bijin-ga (portraits of beautiful women) and she helped elevate the genre to the top echelons of nihonga. Though her work was largely conservative, sharing Meiji Era (1868-1912) ideals of femininity that embraced familial roles and domesticity, Uemura's personal social situation as a single mother was striking in contrast. Her son, born in 1902, was thought to have resulted from an affair with her teacher, Suzuki Shonen (1849-1918) — a married man. Care of the boy was left to her mother, and Uemura supported the family through painting.

While Uemura's figures tend to lack individuality, Ito Shoha's middle- upper-class ladies, such as in "Summer" (1920), display emotional turns. Here a woman sits on a window sill looking bored, sad even, and Ito's facial expressions are less doll-like and more individualized than Uemura's. Shoha's social situation, too, stands in direct contrast to Uemura's. Ito was a faithful housewife and a mother of three, a situation that buoyed her public reception to almost overtake that of Uemura during the Taisho Period (1912-26).

Hisako Kajiwara (1896-1988) grew up in the democracy that characterized the Taisho Period, and the themes of her work moved further down the social ladder. Part of the Jinsei-ha (Humanist School), Kajiwara depicted mental disability with paintings such as "Sisters" (1916), representing the physiognomy of Down Syndrome, and "Tramstop Towards Nightfall" (1918), showing a world-weary woman leaning on her umbrella as she waits for her ride home.

Far left: Shoen Uemura's "Waiting for the Moon" (1926). COURTESY OF THE KYOTO MUNICIPAL MUSEUM OF ART

Kajiwara's pictorial world is a sad and tired one that has been executed in precise detail, earning her the criticism of "vulgar realism." Her techniques were a nod in the direction of Western-style painting, not usually part of a woman's sphere of activity. Her later work from the 1930s, however, concedes to a rosier, less socially engaged view of life.

For Tatsu Hirota (1904-90), that shift from challenging to conservative is observed in reverse. Unlike Europe, Japan had no tradition of the idealized nude as one of the highest form of beauty. Instead, if one looks to the closest native predecessor, ukiyo-e (woodblock prints), the social position of the nude was low, and late 19th-century and early 20th-century audiences responded with according disdain. When the nude first appeared in nihonga during the 1910s, she tended to be treated grotesquely by male artists. Later depictions by the female artist Shima Seien (1892-1970), however, offered an alternative.

The nude essentially remained a proscribed subject for women until post-WWII society permitted otherwise. In 1945, Hirota was painting conventional compositions, such as "Mother and Child," but in 1951 she portrayed "Nude," a mildly abstracted naked body and a formal experiment in line and color. By the '70s, she was depicting women undressing, and by the '80s and '90s, her full nudes went for bare eroticism. Though something of an exception, Hirota released female sensuality instead of restraining it. Rather than a radical challenge to convention, however, late 20th-century nihonga only sanctioned such subjects because of their prior uptake by male artists. The male nude, on the other hand, remains anathema.

"Women Artists of Kyoto: bearing burdens / burdens born" at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art runs till Sept. 5; admission ¥500; open 9 a.m.-5 p.m., closed Mon. For more information, visit www.city.kyoto.jp/bunshi/kmma/en/index.html

Japan Times: Women of the Showa Era

Friday, March 12, 2010

'Showa no Joseitachi'

By JAE LEE

Kiyokawa Taiji Memorial Gallery
Closes March 22

Taiji Kiyokawa (1919-2000) is best known for his works in oil, having produced hundreds of paintings at his Tokyo, Setagaya residence/atlier, which he built himself during the 1960s. Before devoting himself to oil painting in the 1940s, however, Kiyokawa studied at Keio University's Business School in the '30s, where he also joined a photography club.

© TAIJI KIYOKAWA

The photographs that he took during the late '30s and the early '40s are archived, along with his life works, at Taiji Kiyokawa Memorial Gallery; and this spring the gallery will be giving the public the opportunity to see some of the photos in a special exhibition. Being held just below the children's nursery, in what used to be the artist's atlier, "Showa no Joseitachi" (Women of the Showa Era) is as the title suggests — an appreciation of the ladies.

During the Showa Era (1926-1989), Japan went through significant political, economic and philosophical changes. This exhibition explores the affect such changes had on women through five themes: Showa modern, kimono, family, everyday life, and mother. During the 1940s many women began shunning their domestic aprons, preferring to been seen in fashionable high heels and dresses. World War II also drastically changed the role of women in society, as did the country's recovery during the postwar years. The wide scope of the Showa Era allows us to observe such developments through the eyes of Kiyokawa, whose images not only reflect growing female empowerment, but reveal a personal respect for motherhood and feminism.

Kiyokawa Taiji Memorial Gallery is a 3-min. walk from Seijogakuenmae Station. (Odakyu line); open from 10 a.m.- 6 p.m., closed Mon.; admission ¥200. For more information, visit www.kiyokawataiji-annex.jp

Japan Times: Yumeji Takahisa and Taisho Era Romance

Friday, Feb. 26, 2010

Yumeji Takahisa and Taisho Era Romance

By MARIUS GOMBRICH

Yumeji Takehisa Museum Closes on March 28

Located next to Tokyo University, the Yumeji Takehisa Museum is dedicated to one of the unique painters of the late Meiji (1868-1912) and Taisho (1912-28) eras. One of the reasons his art was so distinctive was because he was self-taught. His hanga prints and illustrations, featuring beautiful women, have a lot in common with Nihonga bijinga, but, free of artistic conventions, Takehisa was also able to successfully absorb foreign artistic influences and techniques while clinging to traditional subject matter and atmosphere.

"Mai" (1926) by Yumeji Takehisa (woodblock print)

While Nihonga bijinga tend to be doll-like and rigid, Takehisa's have a beautiful, sinuous, expressive quality combined with an atmosphere of melancholy. This bittersweet combination also made him the quintessential artist of the Taisho Era, a time of unparalleled prosperity for Japan that was marred by political struggles and the adverse effects of rapid industrialization.

With its 250 items, the exhibition strives to place the artist at the center of an extended artistic context — although he was always something of a populist outcast from elite artistic circles, making his living working as an illustrator for magazines such as Shin-Shojo (New Girl) and Fujin no tomo (Women's Friend), among others.

The exhibition's five sections include pictures of musicians, fashionable ladies and show-business figures. The unifying thread is the typical Yumeji beauty: a graceful, elegant, slightly put-upon creature in a kimono and with a faraway look in her eyes. She serves as an interesting counterpoint to the social reality of the time, which history tells us was dominated by the brashly confident and economically (and sexually) independent moga (modern girl), the Japanese equivalent of the West's flappers.