Thursday, June 27th 2024
From paintings, printmaking and muralism, the influence Go Yayanagi has had over the last 50 years of Japanese modern art is palpable and profound. This short bio about Yayanagi from Whitestone Gallery (which has hosted the work from Yayanagi in the past) sums it all perfectly: “After dropping out of University, Go Yayanagi moves to São Paulo (Brazil) and engages in various creative activities there. Yayanagi travels a lot around the world, then, transfers to Paris where he begins to study under the copperplate printing’s master, S.W. Hayter. Yayanagi’s works are presented at many exhibitions, among which the 11th São Paulo Biennial (1957) is included. The Artist considers art as something that should exist in every living space casually rather than something that is prominent displayed ostentatiously. Yayanagi creates works in a wide range of formats, from oil painting, printing, mosaic mural and stained glass, to textile and fashion design. The artist successfully visualizes the social conditions of the time, combining bold composition of color planes, vivid colors produced by removing unnecessary shadows, eroticism presented in a cheerful tone, and his humor, like putting puzzle pieces together. The abundant exoticism the artist experienced in his youth embraces him, and that seems to make his art borderless beyond any logic, a long way ahead of the trend of the world”.
Yayanagi, who has been active as an artist for more than 70 years, will compare his past-present-future to the sports term “hop step jump” and sharpen his leap forward: “When I moved to Tokyo from the countryside, I decided to start painting after being inspired by a work by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890). That was my “hop”. I then continued painting while traveling all over the world, which was my “step”. And now I have come to my “jump”. It has been 70 years since I started painting, and it passed by in the blink of an eye. Now I have to make another big jump towards the future. And at this moment, I am making a big jump forward. That is the meaning behind the exhibition title “Hop Step Jump”, he says.
The work of Yayanagi is very psychedelic, dynamic and colorful, and finds its inspiration in nature, as the artist himself has stated: “I grew up in the countryside where my family owned a ranch, so I was always surrounded by animals since childhood. I studied livestock breeding in the Obihiro Agricultural High School, and I performed many animal dissections. There is a disease called “equine infectious anemia” that is specific to horses. This disease reminded me that organisms can enter our bodies without us realizing it. Though it’s not constantly in my mind, when I’m making a painting, the objects I paint sometimes turn out to have strange, flabby forms, or the straight and curved lines become mixed and twisted with each other. This happens naturally, and I sometimes think that what I just painted is not my painting”. Some of Yayanagi’s earlier pieces presented a recurrent pattern of black & white stripes, which were also inspired by nature – more specifically, by the stripes of the zebras he saw while in Africa, and his studies on black & white composition were studied thoroughly after he moved to France.
As for his process, he expresses that the more freedom he has to create, the harder it gets: “It is very important. But creating freely is the most difficult thing. Paradoxically, having freedom is a very restricted condition. Though I see freedom of speech as a unique phenomenon, in the world of painting, I always think that there is nothing more difficult than having freedom”.
Even though most of us expect to retire by the time we hit Yayanagi’s age, for him, his path and creative journey still has many moons to come: “I have been painting for over 70 years, but I believe that I’ve only just begun. My painting “Dream Frog. Spring has come!” depicts a jumping frog, and like this frog, I myself have just begun to jump. Of course, there’s also the will of the heavens, so I cannot say for sure what will happen in the future. But I plan to keep jumping as much as I can, and I hope to live out my remaining years painting what I like”.
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