This is an article published in the Art Magazine in China in 1997 (volume 7) that I came across in an art forum on the Internet. It has the drawing studies for one of my early works with the theme of ferrying performing troupes to boats. It has a very different style from my later works but nonetheless is a vivid reflection of the culture and life at the time.
http://bbs.artron.net/forum.php…
我在網上偶遇這篇登在1997年美術雜誌的文章。文章中有我早期代表作“送戲上船”和素描草稿。這幅畫和我後來作品的風格不同。但是十分生動地反映了當時的文化和生活。
http://bbs.artron.net/forum.php…
Around the middle of the Cultural Revolution, the regional repertory troupe (Guangdong Cantonese) of Zhaoqching that I worked for was converted into a cultural worker troupe. It frequently went into the hills of Guangxi to perform popular segments and songs from model theater. I still remember how farmers holding burning and electric torches would troop along the paths between the rice paddies to gather around the temporary stage. The troupe was rehearsing the play Island Militia Women during that time so I was sent to the nearest South Sea fishing village - (Zhapo Fishing Harbor in Dianbai County) - to collect references for stage art.
文革中期,我當年服務的肈慶地區話劇團(廣東粵語),在文革時期轉型為文工團,經常在粵西山區下鄉為農民演出樣板戲中的折子戲、著名唱段等,農民們打著火把、電筒,沿著蜿蜒的田間小路紛紛到臨時戲棚看戲的場景令人印象深刻。那段時間,劇團正排演話劇《海島女民兵》,派我去最近的南海漁港──電白縣的閘坡漁港收集舞台美術資料。
Zhapo was a small and picturesque ancient fishing harbor. The lack of docking facilities meant that large sea-going wooden fishing boats relied on saipans to
transport food, water, people and fish. The scene gave me inspiration for my painting The Troupe Going Aboard, Through my brush, this scene became one with what I sawwhich represented during the troupes' country tours and acquired a distinctive Guangdong flavor. This painting of cultural workers going out to sea to serve the people aboard the ships was chosen as Guangdong Artists Association's submission to Beijing for that year, . There it was among the first batch of paintings to selected be selected from a mountain of entries of landscape paintings for display. During the exhibition, it was featured in the Beijing Daily, Southern DailyDaily,and Beijing Artmagazine. Large full-color New Year paintings were also printed by the Guangdong Fine Art Publishing.
閘坡為一風景美麗的古老小漁港,但因缺乏碼頭設施,去外海的大型木製漁船,只能靠舢舨運糧運水,載人載魚,這一景象與劇團送戲下鄉的所見在我筆下竟幻化一體,成為有廣東特色的,文化工作者下海上船為民服務的生動畫面,當年被廣東省美協選拔送京,是第一批在有如畫山畫海的送選品中得選的畫作之一,展覽之時,北京日報、南方日報、《北京文藝》雜誌紛紛刊登,廣東省美術出版社還發行大幅單張全彩印刷的年畫。
同時也有1部Youtube影片,追蹤數超過47萬的網紅KAWAII PATEEN,也在其Youtube影片中提到,KAWAII♥PATEEN Report "Shiro-Nuri" (painted in white) artist MINORI interview & June 2014 exhibition Minori is a Shiro-Nuri (painted in white) makeup ...
what the water gave me painting 在 YOSHITOMO NARA Facebook 的最佳解答
Nobody’s Fool ( January 2011 )
Yoshitomo Nara
Do people look to my childhood for sources of my imagery? Back then, the snow-covered fields of the north were about as far away as you could get from the rapid economic growth happening elsewhere. Both my parents worked and my brothers were much older, so the only one home to greet me when I got back from elementary school was a stray cat we’d taken in. Even so, this was the center of my world. In my lonely room, I would twist the radio dial to the American military base station and out blasted rock and roll music. One of history’s first man-made satellites revolved around me up in the night sky. There I was, in touch with the stars and radio waves.
It doesn’t take much imagination to envision how a lonely childhood in such surroundings might give rise to the sensibility in my work. In fact, I also used to believe in this connection. I would close my eyes and conjure childhood scenes, letting my imagination amplify them like the music coming from my speakers.
But now, past the age of fifty and more cool-headed, I’ve begun to wonder how big a role childhood plays in making us who we are as adults. Looking through reproductions of the countless works I’ve made between my late twenties and now, I get the feeling that childhood experiences were merely a catalyst. My art derives less from the self-centered instincts of childhood than from the day-to-day sensory experiences of an adult who has left this realm behind. And, ultimately, taking the big steps pales in importance to the daily need to keep on walking.
While I was in high school, before I had anything to do with art, I worked part-time in a rock café. There I became friends with a graduate student of mathematics who one day started telling me, in layman’s terms, about his major in topology. His explanation made the subject seem less like a branch of mathematics than some fascinating organic philosophy. My understanding is that topology offers you a way to discover the underlying sameness of countless, seemingly disparate, forms. Conversely, it explains why many people, when confronted with apparently identical things, will accept a fake as the genuine article. I later went on to study art, live in Germany, and travel around the world, and the broader perspective I’ve gained has shown me that topology has long been a subtext of my thinking. The more we add complexity, the more we obscure what is truly valuable. Perhaps the reason I began, in the mid-90s, trying to make paintings as simple as possible stems from that introduction to topology gained in my youth.
As a kid listening to U.S. armed-forces radio, I had no idea what the lyrics meant, but I loved the melody and rhythm of the music. In junior high school, my friends and I were already discussing rock and roll like credible music critics, and by the time I started high school, I was hanging out in rock coffee shops and going to live shows. We may have been a small group of social outcasts, but the older kids, who smoked cigarettes and drank, talked to us all night long about movies they’d seen or books they’d read. If the nighttime student quarter had been the school, I’m sure I would have been a straight-A student.
In the 80s, I left my hometown to attend art school, where I was anything but an honors student. There, a model student was one who brought a researcher’s focus to the work at hand. Your bookshelves were stacked with catalogues and reference materials. When you weren’t working away in your studio, you were meeting with like-minded classmates to discuss art past and present, including your own. You were hoping to set new trends in motion. Wholly lacking any grand ambition, I fell well short of this model, with most of my paintings done to satisfy class assignments. I was, however, filling every one of my notebooks, sketchbooks, and scraps of wrapping paper with crazy, graffiti-like drawings.
Looking back on my younger days—Where did where all that sparkling energy go? I used the money from part-time jobs to buy record albums instead of art supplies and catalogues. I went to movies and concerts, hung out with my girlfriend, did funky drawings on paper, and made midnight raids on friends whose boarding-room lights still happened to be on. I spent the passions of my student days outside the school studio. This is not to say I wasn’t envious of the kids who earned the teachers’ praise or who debuted their talents in early exhibitions. Maybe envy is the wrong word. I guess I had the feeling that we were living in separate worlds. Like puffs of cigarette smoke or the rock songs from my speaker, my adolescent energies all vanished in the sky.
Being outside the city and surrounded by rice fields, my art school had no art scene to speak of—I imagined the art world existing in some unknown dimension, like that of TV or the movies. At the time, art could only be discussed in a Western context, and, therefore, seemed unreal. But just as every country kid dreams of life in the big city, this shaky art-school student had visions of the dazzling, far-off realm of contemporary art. Along with this yearning was an equally strong belief that I didn’t deserve admittance to such a world. A typical provincial underachiever!
I did, however, love to draw every day and the scrawled sketches, never shown to anybody, started piling up. Like journal entries reflecting the events of each day, they sometimes intersected memories from the past. My little everyday world became a trigger for the imagination, and I learned to develop and capture the imagery that arose. I was, however, still a long way off from being able to translate those countless images from paper to canvas.
Visions come to us through daydreams and fantasies. Our emotional reaction towards these images makes them real. Listening to my record collection gave me a similar experience. Before the Internet, the precious little information that did exist was to be found in the two or three music magazines available. Most of my records were imported—no liner notes or lyric sheets in Japanese. No matter how much I liked the music, living in a non-English speaking world sadly meant limited access to the meaning of the lyrics. The music came from a land of societal, religious, and subcultural sensibilities apart from my own, where people moved their bodies to it in a different rhythm. But that didn’t stop me from loving it. I never got tired of poring over every inch of the record jackets on my 12-inch vinyl LPs. I took the sounds and verses into my body. Amidst today’s superabundance of information, choosing music is about how best to single out the right album. For me, it was about making the most use of scant information to sharpen my sensibilities, imagination, and conviction. It might be one verse, melody, guitar riff, rhythmic drum beat or bass line, or record jacket that would inspire me and conjure up fresh imagery. Then, with pencil in hand, I would draw these images on paper, one after the other. Beyond good or bad, the pictures had a will of their own, inhabiting the torn pages with freedom and friendliness.
By the time I graduated from university, my painting began to approach the independence of my drawing. As a means for me to represent a world that was mine and mine alone, the paintings may not have been as nimble as the drawings, but I did them without any preliminary sketching. Prizing feelings that arose as I worked, I just kept painting and over-painting until I gained a certain freedom and the sense, though vague at the time, that I had established a singular way of putting images onto canvas. Yet, I hadn’t reached the point where I could declare that I would paint for the rest of my life.
After receiving my undergraduate degree, I entered the graduate school of my university and got a part-time job teaching at an art yobiko—a prep school for students seeking entrance to an art college. As an instructor, training students how to look at and compose things artistically, meant that I also had to learn how to verbalize my thoughts and feelings. This significant growth experience not only allowed me to take stock of my life at the time, but also provided a refreshing opportunity to connect with teenage hearts and minds.
And idealism! Talking to groups of art students, I naturally found myself describing the ideals of an artist. A painful experience for me—I still had no sense of myself as an artist. The more the students showed their affection for me, the more I felt like a failed artist masquerading as a sensei (teacher). After completing my graduate studies, I kept working as a yobiko instructor. And in telling students about the path to becoming an artist, I began to realize that I was still a student myself, with many things yet to learn. I felt that I needed to become a true art student. I decided to study in Germany. The day I left the city where I had long lived, many of my students appeared on the platform to see me off.
Life as a student in Germany was a happy time. I originally intended to go to London, but for economic reasons chose a tuition-free, and, fortunately, academism-free German school. Personal approaches coexisted with conceptual ones, and students tried out a wide range of modes of expression. Technically speaking, we were all students, but each of us brought a creator’s spirit to the fore. The strong wills and opinions of the local students, though, were well in place before they became artists thanks to the German system of early education. As a reticent foreign student from a far-off land, I must have seemed like a mute child. I decided that I would try to make myself understood not through words, but through having people look at my pictures. When winter came and leaden clouds filled the skies, I found myself slipping back to the winters of my childhood. Forgoing attempts to speak in an unknown language, I redoubled my efforts to express myself through visions of my private world. Thinking rather than talking, then illustrating this thought process in drawings and, finally, realizing it in a painting. Instead of defeating you in an argument, I wanted to invite you inside me. Here I was, in a most unexpected place, rediscovering a value that I thought I had lost—I felt that I had finally gained the ability to learn and think, that I had become a student in the truest sense of the word.
But I still wasn’t your typical honors student. My paintings clearly didn’t look like contemporary art, and nobody would say my images fit in the context of European painting. They did, however, catch the gaze of dealers who, with their antennae out for young artists, saw my paintings as new objects that belonged less to the singular world of art and more to the realm of everyday life. Several were impressed by the freshness of my art, and before I knew it, I was invited to hold exhibitions in established galleries—a big step into a wider world.
The six years that I spent in Germany after completing my studies and before returning to Japan were golden days, both for me and my work. Every day and every night, I worked tirelessly to fix onto canvas all the visions that welled up in my head. My living space/studio was in a dreary, concrete former factory building on the outskirts of Cologne. It was the center of my world. Late at night, my surroundings were enveloped in darkness, but my studio was brightly lit. The songs of folk poets flowed out of my speakers. In that place, standing in front of the canvas sometimes felt like traveling on a solitary voyage in outer space—a lonely little spacecraft floating in the darkness of the void. My spaceship could go anywhere in this fantasy while I was painting, even to the edge of the universe.
Suddenly one day, I was flung outside—my spaceship was to be scrapped. My little vehicle turned back into an old concrete building, one that was slated for destruction because it was falling apart. Having lost the spaceship that had accompanied me on my lonely travels, and lacking the energy to look for a new studio, I immediately decided that I might as well go back to my homeland. It was painful and sad to leave the country where I had lived for twelve years and the handful of people I could call friends. But I had lost my ship. The only place I thought to land was my mother country, where long ago those teenagers had waved me goodbye and, in retrospect, whose letters to me while I was in Germany were a valuable source of fuel.
After my long space flight, I returned to Japan with the strange sense of having made a full orbit around the planet. The new studio was a little warehouse on the outskirts of Tokyo, in an area dotted with rice fields and small factories. When the wind blew, swirls of dust slipped in through the cracks, and water leaked down the walls in heavy rains. In my dilapidated warehouse, only one sheet of corrugated metal separated me from the summer heat and winter cold. Despite the funky environment, I was somehow able to keep in midnight contact with the cosmos—the beings I had drawn and painted in Germany began to mature. The emotional quality of the earlier work gave way to a new sense of composure. I worked at refining the former impulsiveness of the drawings and the monochromatic, almost reverent, backgrounds of the paintings. In my pursuit of fresh imagery, I switched from idle experimentation to a more workmanlike approach towards capturing what I saw beyond the canvas.
Children and animals—what simple motifs! Appearing on neat canvases or in ephemeral drawings, these figures are easy on the viewers’ eyes. Occasionally, they shake off my intentions and leap to the feet of their audience, never to return. Because my motifs are accessible, they are often only understood on a superficial level. Sometimes art that results from a long process of development receives only shallow general acceptance, and those who should be interpreting it fail to do so, either through a lack of knowledge or insufficient powers of expression. Take, for example, the music of a specific era. People who lived during this era will naturally appreciate the music that was then popular. Few of these listeners, however, will know, let alone value, the music produced by minor labels, by introspective musicians working under the radar, because it’s music that’s made in answer to an individual’s desire, not the desires of the times. In this way, people who say that “Nara loves rock,” or “Nara loves punk” should see my album collection. Of four thousand records there are probably fewer than fifty punk albums. I do have a lot of 60s and 70s rock and roll, but most of my music is from little labels that never saw commercial success—traditional roots music by black musicians and white musicians, and contemplative folk. The spirit of any era gives birth to trends and fashions as well as their opposite: countless introspective individual worlds. A simultaneous embrace of both has cultivated my sensibility and way of thinking. My artwork is merely the tip of the iceberg that is my self. But if you analyzed the DNA from this tip, you would probably discover a new way of looking at my art. My viewers become a true audience when they take what I’ve made and make it their own. That’s the moment the works gain their freedom, even from their maker.
After contemplative folk singers taught me about deep empathy, the punk rockers schooled me in explosive expression.
I was born on this star, and I’m still breathing. Since childhood, I’ve been a jumble of things learned and experienced and memories that can’t be forgotten. Their involuntary locomotion is my inspiration. I don’t express in words the contents of my work. I’ll only tell you my history. The countless stories living inside my work would become mere fabrications the moment I put them into words. Instead, I use my pencil to turn them into pictures. Standing before the dark abyss, here’s hoping my spaceship launches safely tonight….
what the water gave me painting 在 KAWAII PATEEN Youtube 的精選貼文
KAWAII♥PATEEN Report
"Shiro-Nuri" (painted in white) artist MINORI interview & June 2014 exhibition
Minori is a Shiro-Nuri (painted in white) makeup artist who uses Japanese traditional Shiro-Nuri techniques to express nature-centered themes since 2009.
Her art is not limited to photos, she is herself a living work of art, exhibiting her Shiro-Nuri makeup as a fashion style in everyday life. She calls this style "Monshiro-Joh", which would mean "Miss Small-White" (a play of words with "Monshiro-Choh" which means Small Cabbage White butterfly).
Shiro-Nuri is a Japanese traditional makeup style, and is used by Geisha and actors of Kabuki for a very long time.
Since the Meiji era (1868-1912) the Japanese arts have been greatly influenced by the Fine Arts from the occident,
and started moving from simple handicrafts to fine arts, and lately with the new technologies Japanese arts start another transformation.
This exhibition called HYOH-BYOH is centered around the artists whose art is based on traditional Japanese detailed crafts and workmanship, and still not influenced by new technologies.
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Tokyo Street Fashion KAWAII♥PATEEN
--- Have fun with Fashion! ---
Also on Facebook with tons of photos :
https://www.facebook.com/Tokyo.Street.Fashion.KAWAII.PATEEN
Official site : http://waoryu.jp
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creating decorations as I desire, like a canvas.
People do get scary
I do not care about the criticism
There are clothes I want wear, and I do my make-up accordingly, so with the white painting I also wear it as a fashion.
I truly like the Gothic and the Lolita, and since those types of clothes are decorated, or should I say, the decorations are very detailed, there was a part of me which said it does not match very well with my looks.
During that time, I was not creating, but the desire to express my originality grew more and more. Thus, I started creating on my own or re-make, and I had continued to change my make-up accordingly.
When my face is white, I am able to change the decoration or create a new face like a canvas.
I brought in my favorite "nature" aspect, and gave it more originality.
During that time, I was not creating, but the desire to express my originality grew more and more. Thus, I started creating on my own or re-make, and I had continued to change my make-up accordingly.
When my face is white, I am able to change the decoration or create a new face like a canvas.
I brought in my favorite "nature" aspect, and gave it more originality.
I have different mindsets on fashion photos and art photos. The fashion is based on purely for my enjoyment, but the art photos is an experiment on how much I can express on one theme of nature. And, based on that nature theme, I make my own costume or tell the photographer on how I want to shoot the photos and create something together.
It does make people scary.
The white painting. Yes, when the face is white, people tell me I look dead or it looks creepy, but other than that I do not have any problems.
I have this pure feeling of loving it, and I have a strong feeling of expressing through this white painting style, and it is the strongest thing I want to do in my life. Although others may call it creepy, I do not care much. Seeking what I want to do and finding the meaning of my life is what keeps me going despite the criticism.
This exhibition is called "HYOH-BYOH" (vast and indistinct). It is an exhibition of masterly art of selected artists who create by hand, which is analog but very detailed work.
I was invited by Ikeuchi-san, the curator who thought my make-up to be great and eye catching. Based on the theme of nature becoming visible from the inner face is the main theme. The title is "metabolism". The image I have is absorbing and releasing new things in and out of your self.
It seems there is a body mechanism of blinking without consciousness. I believe in that short moment appears the true nature within me. So, I shot with the theme of nature coming out and disappearing every time I blink my eyes.
The art works have been taken in 4 patterns.
From the top, "sun" "plants" "water" and "earth"
From the left is shown the "sleep" "awakening" "enlightenment" "death".
I am not only changing my make-up, but also my hair as well.
One of the themes is the "sun" from its "awakening" until its death.
This took us a whole day to photo shoot. Starting from the very first status of sleep, I added more make-up and finalized it. It goes same with the hair where I arrange using one whole thing on the same day and at the end, accordingly with "death", I either burn it or spray paint it.