Roman marble statue detail (hand)
Photo: Mishima 1st Road
Written by Liu Lin
Edited by Hu Xinrong
In 1973, an antique shop called "Antique Sakata" was established in Mejiro, an unconventional antique store in Tokyo, owned by Kazumi Sakata (1945-2022), to sell items collected from Africa, Europe, South America, and Asia.
"Tool" means a tool made for a specific need in everyday life. In the 1970s, when the term "antique" or "antique art" was often used, Kazumi Sakata expressed his definition of "antique props" as second-hand objects or tools with signs of use. The definition itself challenged the aesthetic orthodoxy of the time in an understated way—like many words in Japanese culture that are difficult to translate into other languages, such as "wabi-sabi", "mono-mourning", "粋", etc., Sakata and the practical "ancient props" to refer to their aesthetic ideals, creating a semantic contradiction and the ineffable implications of this contradiction. Objects such as coffee filters, tiles, and rags that can almost be regarded as garbage can be regarded as "ancient props" as long as they contain a breath that can be consistent with their aesthetic judgment and experience.
Installation view of "Ancient Props Sakata: Your Choice".
BY ART MATTERS天目里美术馆，2024年
Photo: Xu Jinsong
ON MARCH 21, "ANTIQUE TOOLS SAKATA: YOUR CHOICE AND MINE" OPENED AT THE BY ART MATTERS TENMORI ART MUSEUM. The exhibition presents more than 400 objects handled by antique shop and aesthete Kazumi Sakata from different periods, including various household utensils from different civilizations, such as Afghan stone tools from the second century BC, Egyptian cloth from the sixth century, Yayoi pottery from the second century, Delft white pottery from the Netherlands in the 18th century, African wooden tools from the 20th century, European furniture from the 18th century, and second-hand objects that can be found everywhere in daily life.
Curator Ryuta Aoyagi returns to the direct display of "objects" in the exhibition in an extreme, unobtrusive way, inviting the viewer to intuitively enter the deep world of Kazumi Sakata's aesthetics. As Kazumi Sakata's first large-scale museum exhibition in China, the exhibition not only presents the audience with the penetrating aesthetic eye of an aesthetic master, but also asks how we can re-evaluate the standards of beauty and its important place in our life experience. By juxtaposing everyday leftovers with genuine antiques, objects that once had a functional function are removed from practicality and replaced by a comprehensive aesthetic experience. This aesthetic experience is not only concerned with the form and material of the object itself, but also with the aftertaste of the object that has been stripped from its practical function, a sliding and even unknowable meaning, such as the story behind the ancient props—the open narrative space composed of the speculations of those who see, touch, and use it, and the emotions that are engulfed by these narrative spaces.
Photo: Jiang Liuliu
This aesthetic method is completely different from the modern aesthetics based on Western aesthetic standards, just as the philosopher Kuki Shuzo said when talking about the classification of different types of civilization and cultural forms, "the Greek culture that constitutes Western culture is the culture of intellectuality, the Arab culture is the culture of will, and the Oriental culture is generally the culture of emotion", and further regarded Japanese culture as "an emotional culture in the true sense of life that expresses innocence". In fact, since the Heian period in Japan, the Japanese aesthetic consciousness represented by the "mono mourning" (物の哀れ) advocated by Nobunaga Motoi is the embodiment of this "emotional culture", and it is also the long-term adherence of Japanese folk art practitioners represented by Kazumi Sakata.
"The scale of self-appreciation"
From the perspective of a contemporary art exhibition, what exactly does "Antique Tool Sakata: Your Choice and My Choice" show? Or what kind of aesthetic experience do we expect in art museums/museums, and even in daily life? The exhibition says to the audience, "You might like it." Or you might hate it. It doesn't matter. There is no right answer. In fact, to force oneself to be the standard of aesthetics would be contrary to the aesthetics that Kazumi Sakata upholds. Kazumi Sakata believes that everyone needs to use their own likes and dislikes as the measure of aesthetics. In his book "The Measure of Self-Appreciation", Sakata explores the criteria for aesthetic judgment purely from the individual, starting from dozens of ancient artifacts. Beauty is a debatable and difficult object to capture in Kazumi Sakata. The choices made by Kazumi Sakata when handling the ancient props, the choices made by the curators in the arrangement of the exhibition, and the choices made by each audience member at the scene all constitute a judgment of beauty. It is for this reason that the curator Aoyagi used the original title of "The Scale of Lonely Fang Self-Appreciation" ("僕たちの選択") as the title of this exhibition.
Another connotation of "your choice" is reflected in the relationship between the work and the collection – from the 1970s to the present, it takes courage to collect Kazumi Sakata's ancient props. Kazumi Sakata bluntly said that the detached from the environment of the antique prop shop and from the owner's aesthetic of the antique props is actually "garbage", and "the same item can be like a work of art or like garbage," says Kazumi Sakata. In his view, the beauty of an object often comes from its sense of balance with other objects and spaces. In this sense, collectors are not persuaded by Sakata or by the artifacts themselves, but by their own "self-righteous" judgments.
Exhibits that lack description are not silent objects
In the exhibition "Ancient Props Sakata: Your Choice", it is almost impossible to see the exhibition signs (as is the case in Sakata's antique prop shop, where collectors are almost hollowed out of experience to discover the beauty of ancient props), and the curator Ryuta Aoyagi expects the audience to see and experience them, rather than using reason (knowledge) in advance to build a barrier between people and things, severing the natural relationship. Although there are more than 400 antique artifacts, there is no doubt that there is a cultural factor, whether it is white pottery in Delft, the Netherlands, or sculptures with the imprint of a specific era. But all cultural factors give way to the audience's "simple" viewing of ancient props. More than 400 pieces of ancient props are not displayed according to time clues and category sources, but emphasize the dialogue/intertextual relationship between objects, and the traditional sense of "value" cannot be the standard for judging the beauty of ancient props. In the exhibition, the antique props form a unified whole with an equal attitude (this contradiction comes from the opposition between the special and the universal).
Viewers often get lost in the exhibition halls of contemporary art. The philosopher Theodor Adorno once said, "Educated philistines are in the habit of asking a work of art to 'give' them something." They no longer feel unpleasant about radical works, but resort to that humble to shameless perception that they do not understand. ”
The art of the classical period never separated itself from the living world, such as church frescoes, square sculptures or festive music, all of which were contained in the context of everyday life. The philosopher John Dewey once based the occurrence of art on the overlap of the experience of the viewer and the work (and its creator), and from this put forward the thesis that "art is experience". However, the more than 400 ancient artifacts displayed in front of us may seem anti-aesthetic experience or even anti-experience at first glance, but after a little thought, we will find that they come from the extremely personal aesthetic experience of the living world—the choice of Kazumi Sakata, the choice of Ryuta Aoyagi, the choice of the Tenmuli Art Museum, and the choices of different audiences. Here, in a rather tortuous and circuitous way, the aesthetic experience finally returns to the universal aesthetic experience as an individual.
Tin plate, photo: Mishima 1st Road
What can we see in the exhibition? The fact is that these ancient objects are placed in front of you, "is" showing you, it may be some creases, defects, or even a "pattern" formed by stains, and the reflections of completeness-incompleteness, life-death, instant-eternity, and emptiness-reality in Eastern aesthetics send out a silent dialogue like a Zen public case in the exhibition: we need to save ourselves from the aesthetic judgment of dualism. Graham Harman, in his "object-oriented philosophy," wrote, "A red billiard ball collides with a green billiard ball." Snowflakes flickered in the sunlight and were subsequently wiped out by it, and the damaged submarine rusted on the seabed of the ocean. When mills made flour, earthquakes crushed lime, and giant mushrooms spread across Michigan's forests. When human philosophers attack each other, arguing about whether or not they can 'reach' the world, sharks bite tuna to death and icebergs crash into the coastline. "Everything is what it is, and they are constantly emerging to the world with their inexhaustible unique properties.
In the exhibition hall, there is a pair of worn leather shoes. This is reminiscent of Heidegger's description of the leather boots in Van Gogh's paintings, "from the black holes in the worn interior of the shoes, the hardships of the toil." In these hard, heavy and dilapidated peasant shoes, there is a tenacity and sluggishness of the steps that move on the endless monotonous ridges in the cold wind and steep weather...... "The boundary between the daily and the non-everyday is also very blurred here in Kazumi Sakata, and from the perspective of Chinese to understand (misunderstand), the word "Tao" of "prop" also suggests a certain profound connotation, as Lao Tzu said, "The Tao is drowning in, and the Tao is in the barnyard barnyard - by the way, the famous tea man Araki Murashige during the Warring States Period in Japan once used "Dao dung" as his name - It is in the remnants of everyday life that a myriad of dazzling divinities about the nature of life vibrates.
The tea man leaves......
Kazumi Sakata has found something between something pure and a prop (tool/utensil/utensil), one that originally possessed instrumentality, but has now been completely stripped of its usefulness to a unique aftertaste that cannot be replicated by temporality and uncertainty. After entering the exhibition intuitively, after entering these objects, if there is still a need for "culture", the specific information behind the ancient props is gradually revealed. For example, Kazumi Sakata's beloved porcelain from Delft, a Dutch town that became the centre of the Dutch pottery industry in the 17th century. In contrast to faience, Sakata is fascinated by unpatterned white-glazed pottery, which is used as a daily necessities. In 1997, he curated the "Delft White Glazed Pottery Exhibition" in his store, allowing this object to be exposed to the beauty of this object buried outside the aesthetic world. In fact, Kazumi Sakata has spent his life working tirelessly to discover these easily overlooked beauties. In 1994, Kazumi Sakata founded the As It is Museum (designed by Yoshifumi Nakamura) and conveyed his aesthetic ideas to the audience through various types of exhibitions and events.
Delft white-glazed pottery plate, photo: Mishima 1st Road
So, what is the difference between the display of antique props and works of art, and what is the difference between the display of antique props and the display of art exhibitions? What is the enlightenment of presenting antique props in an art museum? In fact, it is not the key to discuss whether antique props are art or not. Categorizing all these objects as the work of Kazumi Sakata poses another danger, art is nothing more than a cultural factor here, and from Sakata's point of view, we may need to ask the question, do art museums have to show art about beauty? Can beauty itself, or something beyond beauty, have a place in a white box?
At the end of the exhibition hall, curator Ryuta Aoyagi set up a dimly lit "tea room" (Sukiya) in which tatami mats used by Kazumi Sakata were displayed. In the center of the tatami mats are two ship-shaped sculptures – amulets made from floating wood and walrus bones by the Inuit who lived on the island of St. Lawrence in the early 19th century – that seem to be carrying Sakata on a new aesthetic journey. As the meaning of "Shukiya" itself indicates, it is a place of unadorned silence that "abandons all redundancy and retains only the necessities of aesthetic needs; It is also a place that advocates the beauty of incompleteness, and deliberately leaves the unfinished to be left to be completed by the imagination (Okakura Tianxinyu)." The entrance to the exhibition hall is ajar, and it seems to be telling: Did the tea man just enter, or did he leave temporarily?
(Article from Art News Chinese Edition)
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