[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
(1) "Suspended Pool 94-2", black granite, 17 x 64 x 35 1/2",
1994.
(2) "Untitled 93-13", black granite/white bronze, 6 x 25 1/4 x
24", 1993.
(3) "Untitled 94-12", black granite/bronze, 6 3/4 x 24 x 19 3/4",
1994.
(4) "Suspended Pool 93-11", black granite/bronze, 25 1/2 x 39
3/4 x 26 3/4", 1993.
by Ray Zone
(Merging One Gallery, Santa Monica) The spare and elegant sculpture and
drawings of Seiji Kunishima expand the unique yet traditional milieu of
this excellent artist. Kunishima has exhibited widely internationally since
1963, and it's easy to understand his widespread appeal in that his work,
though abstract, is still constructed with both implicit and explicit figurative
elements from the world of nature that resonates in the mind of the onlooker.
The Japanese culture has for centuries fostered a vision of the world in
its art whereby the emptiness of form, or space adjacent to form, is important.
This surrounding vessel of emptiness is coequal to, and sometimes more important
than, the form itself. What is this emptiness? It is the whiteness of the
canvas or paper where no image is rendered. It is the air, the very volume
of an empty cup. It is all the space where no tree grows, or no rock rests
in a garden. These blanknesses, this whiteness, this air critically defines
the solidity of the form and shapes it by its very absence. All of the traditional
Japanese art forms incorporate this emptiness and honor it with a formidably
simple and, sometimes, austere repertoire of expressions.
Kunishima's work is innovative and traditional at once. It points out the
value of the Eastern traditions in understanding the entire body of modern,
abstract art. Centuries before reductivist art and minimalism, Japanese
sculptors, potters and painters were saying the same thing: that what is
at the periphery of our field of view, and just beyond it, is as important
as what is central to it. This aesthetic is obviously at play in the wonderfully
spare music of Toru Takemitsu and Somei Satoh, whose compositions are a
sonic counterpart to the sculptures of Kunishima. Whole passages are filled
with greater or lesser degrees of silence. And again, the work is daringly
inventive yet built on an aesthetic that is milennial in age.
Kunishima's sense of nature is acute. Consider the small sculpture Untitled
94-12. Atop two polished black granite plates, a half-circle on top
of a full circle, rests what appears to be a large stick. The juxtaposition
of the craggy natural form of the stick, which is actually cast bronze,
and the elegantly milled black granite is striking. The black granite is
smooth and regular, almost like flying saucers, and the bronze "stick"
sitting crossways atop it is jarringly irregular. Form is disconcertingly
juxtaposed with emptiness in a dramatic fashion. It is a radical marriage
of dissimilarities.
Another, and similar, piece is Untitled 93-13. Here again are two
circular forms made of highly polished black granite. Resting on top of
them are what appear to be stones. Only the stones are made of cast bronze.
The machine-like reflective surface of the black granite again is in striking
contrast to the natural surface and humble shape of the apparent stones
on that glistening bed.
A significantly larger work is Suspended Pool 94-2. Three circular
forms of flat black granite, with highly polished surfaces, are stacked
on top of each other. The title is apt and makes you actually see a series
of pools ascending up the side of a mountain. It is the sides of these flat
circles that are unworked to remind us of their artisanal nature. This work
is formidably simple and elegant to a fault. It evokes the real world of
nature and yet emphatically asserts its own, ideal character.
This exhibit is an opportunity to view the work of a radical traditionalist.
Emptiness has rarely had such a celebration in modern art.
