Cashier Xiao Qiu
Starting april 28 this year, a special exhibition entitled "Keiji Usami – The Resurrected Painter" was held at the Komagata Museum at the University of Tokyo in Japan. Although the scale of this exhibition is not very large, it basically covers the complete artistic career of Usami Keiji. From his early abstract works to his later creations that incorporate new technologies, they are all within the scope of this exhibition.
For the vast majority of the population, this information may just be a piece of news that has slipped through the SNS. But for those who know the ins and outs behind the exhibition, its opening has a greater significance. An important clue is the word "resurrection" in the subtitle of the show. A necessary prerequisite for the resurrection is to have a "passing away." Indeed, the painter himself died of illness in 2012 at the age of 72. But one of the "deaths" that is more relevant to this exhibition is the "murder" of his work on the campus of UTokyo after the painter's death.
In March 2018, some people on campus discovered that the painting "Bondage" (きずな), originally hung in the Central Cafeteria of Utokyo, had disappeared after the renovation of the cafeteria had been completed. After several tossing and turning, the University of Tokyo Consumer Life Synergy Group (hereinafter referred to as the "Student Association"), which is the manager, finally admitted that it discarded the painting during the renovation and cannot be retrieved. This event was immediately fermented by UTokyo graduates and art people in cyberspace. The destruction of works of art by modern civil society is enough to make people indignant, and it is even more unacceptable to the public that it has occurred in the top universities that should have undertaken to inherit and carry forward the artistic heritage. Since then, the school has made several rounds of apologies and organized a series of activities to recover its losses, and the above-mentioned exhibition is the latest part of the relevant initiative.
As a separate event, the destruction of the painting was undoubtedly a "crisis" in the credibility of the university. But if the wider public can thus rethink the public art of our time, this misfortune may also be a "turning point" to some extent.
Usami Guishi exhibition poster. Image source: Komaba Museum, University of Tokyo.
Usami Keiji
Keiji Usa was born on January 29, 1940 in Kitita, Osaka Prefecture. After graduating from Osaka's local high school in 1958, he came to Tokyo to pursue his artistic dreams. Five years later, he had his first solo exhibition at the prestigious South Gallery. Since then, his artistic career has been smooth sailing. In 1965, he participated in a special exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1972, Usami was selected as the representative of the Japan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In addition to artistic practice, Usami is also committed to theoretical exploration. As a university professor, he has authored a large number of books, including "On Painting", which is still an important reference for art students. In 2002, he was awarded the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Award.
Overall, Usami's creative career can be roughly divided into two parts. In the early days, his works were dominated by abstract graphics and disorderly arrangements. In the later period, the focus on the characters became a key to his creation. Japanese scholar Izumi Suzuki pointed out that Usami's later portrait works can be subdivided into two paragraphs. Before the mid-1960s, Usami was concerned with depicting human faces. After this, the "body" became the subject of his creations. One reason for this change was the Watts Riots in the Watts area of Los Angeles, USA, in 1965. Although the area is almost entirely occupied by a black population, the police under its jurisdiction are whites with racist overtones. Under the combined influence of high unemployment and other factors, from August 11 to 17 of that year, the black people launched a series of protests. Usami, who has a keen interest in this social event, took inspiration from the news photos published in Life magazine. From this, he extracted and symbolized the four black human states captured by the camera, "running", "leaning forward", "crouching" and "throwing stones". Since then, these four movements and the human body behind them have become a major theme throughout Usami's creation.
Professor Suzuki also pointed out that Usami's position in the post-war Japanese art world is somewhat "difficult to classify". During his active period, the dominant force in the Japanese art world was dominated by the so-called "Monogatari School" (もの派). They attempted to explore the influence of different materials on their creative activities, but Usami untimely continued to emphasize the "restoration" of traditional painting forms. Behind the contradiction between the two is actually a different theoretical basis. In the 1960s and 1970s, the idea that dominated the Japanese painting scene was undoubtedly phenomenology. Artists try to bracket everything for granted, and from this point on a reflection on the current system. But Suzuki reminds us that in reality, this attempt often stops at the level of analyzing individual consciousness, and does not make a strong critique of the social system. In contrast, Usami, who had obvious structuralist overtones, although retrograde with the trend of the time, was more confrontational in practice. Because his structuralism did not rationalize the structure, he always thought about the possibility of structural transformation and system change.
The central canteen of the University of Tokyo before the renovation and "Bondage". Image source: University of Tokyo.
The Lost "Bondage"
Usami's painting for the University of Tokyo was the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the university's Student Association in 1976. The Memorial Committee decided to collect money from the members of the association and invited famous painters to make paintings decorated in the central canteen. At that time, Senior Shu'er, a faculty member of the Faculty of Literature of UTokyo, proposed that the work should meet three conditions: first, it should be good enough, secondly, it should be contemporary, and finally it needs to provide intellectual stimulation for teachers and students in the school. And Usami Keiji was the first candidate he immediately remembered. The painter who gladly accepted it finally completed the masterpiece "Bondage", which can be hung on the wall of the canteen for about 4 × 4 meters. As mentioned earlier, the artist was in a period of return to the body at the time of the creation of this work. The bodies featured in "Bondage" are the four gestures taken from magazine coverage of the Black Riots.
However, in the work we can not find a "complete" body. Instead, the four postures are divided into different groups by "two twos" or "threes". In a combination, the body to which each pose belongs can be subdivided into common parts and independent parts (probably for the purpose of indoctrination, the author directly classifies the "body" parts in the diagram with intersecting mathematical symbols). The two parts are finally fused through linear patterns and gradients of colors. It can be seen from this that for Usami no one can exist in isolation from the other, and only through interaction with others can we achieve completeness. The fact that the individuals who eventually formed were anti-system protesters broke him off from conservative structuralists.
Ironically, Bondage, which was born from one anniversary, disappears because of another. To go back to the destruction of Usami's paintings at Todai, we need to turn the clock back to 2016. At the end of that year, the school decided that as part of the 140th anniversary of the school, it would carry out a comprehensive renovation of the central canteen. In June 2017, the renovation project encountered a difficult problem in how to deal with painting. After discussion, the Committee decided to abandon it altogether. On September 14, the relevant industry removed the painting from the wall of the canteen. On the 27th, the employees used a carving knife to shred the painting and burned it. The burned ashes are recycled as recycled sand.
At the end of March 2018, the renovation of the canteen was completed and opened to the public. Soon, someone questioned the current situation of "Bondage" in the opinion exchange version of the Student Association. The official answer given by the Association on March 15 was: "Due to the content of the painting and the design of the sound-absorbing wall, the painting could not be transferred, so the decision to deal with it was made." This unacceptable answer was quickly criticized by teachers and students. With the participation of the mass media and the Internet, the pressure on the UTokyo Student Association has gradually increased. Finally, on April 27 of the same year, the Association deleted the answer from its official website and said it had a "factual error." On May 8, the vice president of the University of Tokyo, the chairman of the Student Association, and the special director of the canteen project issued three open letters in a row, expressing their apologies while explaining the incident in detail. An important fact revealed by these documents is that during the renovation of the canteen, a consultant professor proposed a specific plan for the safe removal and subsequent protection of the painting, but this opinion was not shared by the committee members. This led them to finally choose between two limited options: "save and change the design of the canteen in situ" and "discard the painting".
The disappearance of the painting most directly affects the teachers and students who dine here. They lost the "bondage" between them and "Bondage". Chiji Kuroi, a Japanese writer who was also a student at TheOkite University, wrote the following text about the painting on the occasion of Keiji Usami's past solo exhibition: "While the students below it eat, the painting also silently tries to integrate into the restaurant. It's a dynamic, a practice, and an intellectual operation. Even if no one is staring at the painting, the students on the ground and the paintings on the wall are secretly interacting. Painting and people are related to each other in their disregard for each other. Both parties unconsciously acknowledge the existence of the other, and an incredible atmosphere arises. Naturally, this moving connection between the spectator and art also ceases to exist because of the physical disappearance of art.
On a deeper level, the value of art is never just the work itself. The destruction of "Bondage" is not just the disappearance of a famous painting. The aforementioned scholar Suzuki Izumi reminds us to pay attention to the more macroscopic space in which painting is located. The Central Canteen of UTokyo is located in the lower part of the school's iconic Yasuda Lecture Hall. In January 1969, the entire building was occupied by radical students. They gathered here for various reasons, including opposing the Vietnam War, the automatic renewal of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty, or the authoritarian style of the school authorities. The confrontation between the students of Togaku University and the police is undoubtedly a very important chapter in the history of post-war Japan. Thus, through "Bondage", which is based on the black riots, a contemporary sense of resistance that spreads across the globe has also achieved "bondage" between each other. Admittedly, not every student who goes to the cafeteria thinks of this history, but as the "subconscious" mentioned by Kuroi above suggests: the paintings hint at another possibility for students about social structure. And with the destruction of the painting, this hope of possible realization has once again become a little bleak.
After the famous painting was destroyed
In order to compensate for the negative impact of the destruction of the paintings on the reputation of the school, the University of Tokyo has launched a series of initiatives. In addition to several sincere apology letters issued by those responsible, on September 28, 2018, a lecture entitled "From Keiji Usami's Bondage" was held at the Yasuda Lecture Hall in the upper part of the cafeteria. The lecture, which lasted throughout the day, featured nearly ten art-related scholars, and the President of UTokyo attended and delivered an opening speech. After that, all the manuscripts of the lecture were collected into a book and distributed to the public. In addition to the official forum of today, the Japanese Alliance of Art Critics also held a seminar on the matter at the end of 2018 entitled "The Right to Things, the Life of Works". Coupled with the special reports of major media, it can be said that the discussion caused by the abandonment of "Bondage" has become an opportunity for teachers, students and the public to re-understand art.
One of the first issues raised at the UTokyo symposium was the root cause of the discarding incident. Naoyuki Kinoshita, a professor at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Tokyo and director of the Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, suggested that the discarding of works of art is nothing more than two cases. First, people don't realize it's art. In the central canteen, "Bondage" basically appears directly in front of everyone in a nude form. There is no protective device on top of the painting, and there is no description of it around the painting. As a result, even teachers and students who know that it is Usami's work are likely to think that it is a replica and neglect to dispose of it. To expand further, this "non-perception" of art has a great similarity with the public's appreciation of postmodern works. The passages we often hear, such as "treating exhibits as garbage", are the embodiment of this tension between the work and the viewer. Although for Usami, who emphasized the "restoration" of the form of painting, this postmodern situation did not fully correspond. But it is very likely that the author deliberately did not set up a nameplate and added annotations to the painting in order to narrow the distance with the audience, which also plunged "Bondage" into the same contradiction.
In contrast, the second type of painting is discarded under the premise of "knowing that it is a work of art". In other words, such destruction is a conclusion reached after a "rational" calculation of the pros and cons. In the case of Bondage, the available evidence does not seem to fully support this hypothesis. But if we zoom in on the field of view, a similar situation is not difficult to find. A good example is the series of reliefs created by artist Taro Okamoto for the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government, which was originally located near Tokyo Station in the city center, moved to a new building in Shinjuku in April 1991 due to outdated facilities and cramped office space. During the demolition process, the removal of 11 reliefs of various sizes created by Okamoto became the focus of discussion. Kenzo Tange, the designer of the Shinto Hall, recognized the artistry of these works and embarked on a conservation campaign of a certain scale. But after several rounds of discussion, Tange himself admitted that "if you want to keep the reliefs, the cost and cycle of the project will increase exponentially." Eventually, with the consent of the author himself, two of the most famous works were reduced and reproduced, and all the sculptures were destroyed.
Compared with the destruction in the state of ignorance, conscious choice, although helpless, seems to be more acceptable. But if we delve into the premise of this logic, its "rationality" is not so solid. Here, a key variable is "ownership." In most cases, the author of public art transfers ownership of the work to the manager of the facility in which the work ends up. On top of this, the latter, as the owner, has the right to dispose of it. In its early replies, UTokyo repeatedly emphasized that all the people in "Bondage" were the students of the school, and the subtext was that even the destruction of ignorance was within their rights. But both the school's own apology letters and the scholars who attended the forum repeatedly mentioned the complexity of public art ownership. Unlike private art, the "possession" and appreciation of them should theoretically be open and non-exclusive. Perhaps no specific individual or institution can represent the abstract "public" to exercise power over it, but such as the emotional support of teachers and students on "Bondage" and the intellectual inspiration that the work can bring to everyone are also the "costs" that need to be taken into account. The balance that clearly ignores the destruction of this element on the decision-making "balance sheet" is not entirely justified.
Another representative public art: Taro Okamoto's "Myth of Tomorrow" at Shibuya Station. The day-to-day maintenance of the work is the responsibility of the NGO "Myth of Tomorrow Preservation Successor Agency". The operation of the institution is funded by volunteers and public associations and private enterprises near the station. It can be considered an example of a public art display. Image from the NGO's official website: https://www.asunoshinwa.or.jp/asunoshinwa/
In addition, the more macroscopic connection between this event and contemporary public art is also a core of public discussion. In particular, the way art is preserved and managed in the information age has attracted much attention. Today, traditional art galleries and museums face physical limitations in the first place. Quantitatively, the ever-expanding flow of art has left collecting institutions, mostly built in the mid-to-late last century, facing a management crisis. For example, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo is responsible for an average of more than 1,000 collections per researcher. Qualitatively, the increasingly diverse forms of artworks also make the traditional enclosed exhibition space surrounded by four walls look outdated. It can even be said that forms such as "Bondage", which are placed directly in the public and not in the special exhibition space, have inadvertently become the pioneers of today's art museums. And the problems it faces can also become the stone of the latter's mountain.
And the traditional exhibition method is gradually obsolete and parallel to the new problems of the network era represented by "informatization". In the seminar, the sculptor Kenjiro Okazaki pointed out that today's exhibition space actually has two forms: real and virtual. In other words, how to convey the information about the exhibition and the way the curator wants to see it to the public has become as important in the information age as the physical exhibition. This trend has taken to extremes and even "dematerialized" the show itself (the "online museums" that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic have also unexpectedly driven this change). Art galleries don't even need a "wall" to hang paintings, just a digital platform. A side effect of this "democratization" of exhibition viewing is that the material form of the exhibits is increasingly neglected. Let's go back to Bondage. Okazaki admits that one of the reasons why paintings are not valued is that the "importance of information" of the author Usami herself has gradually decreased. The first part mentions that although Usami had a place in the post-war Japanese art world, his retrograde personality with the trend of the times made the artist often overlooked in the textbook history of art generations. The painter's weak vocal ability also made his work unappreciated. What's even more interesting is that the "murder" of "Bondage" is actually a case that occurred in the "information space". The visitors did not see the process of the painting's destruction or its final "wreckage" from beginning to end. If it were not for the response of the Association in the same virtual space on the official website, perhaps most people would not have known about this incident. That is to say, in our time, whether a work of art is alive or dead, it is possible that no one will know about it and thus "did not happen".
For this special exhibition of Usami Keiji, many media inside and outside the school have carried out publicity and coverage in advance. Before welcoming the public, the University of Tokyo also set aside two weeks of "internal opening" time to facilitate the visit and debate of teachers and students. A big attraction of the exhibition is the restoration of many of the artist's early works with the latest technology. Among them was Usami's 1968 publication of the world's first installations completed with laser light. Based on a large number of materials and photos, "Bondage" is naturally also a major focus of the exhibition. The curator chose to recreate the "physical object" to help everyone recall the art world of Usami Keiji.
bibliography:
Atsushi Miura, Kenji Kajiya, Osamu Shimizu, Symposium "Starting from Keiji Usami's Kizuna", The University of Tokyo Publishing, 2019
Yu Tsukada reports on the 2018 Symposium on the Rights of Things, the Life of Works:
https://www.aicajapan.com/ja/symposium2018report/
Editor-in-Charge: Fan Zhu
Proofreader: Yan Zhang