No More Tributes to Mount Fuji

By EDWARD M. GOMEZ

For centuries, a deeply rooted appreciation of nature has played a central role in the spiritual and cultural life of Japan. Japanese artists traditionally reflected this reverence not in intellectual abstractions but concretely, in highly stylized representations of specific rivers, mountains, plants and animals. As in other aspects of Japanese thought and behavior, artists were expected to remain respectful of the past and concentrate on certain well-established forms and techniques. But during the Meiji era (1868-1912), modernism was introduced from the West, knocking major dents in this rigid system with an emphasis on innovation, individualism and the search for new forms. Japanese artists, emulating European easel painting, began to produce portraits and still lifes in oil -- new subjects in a new medium. Later in the 20th century and especially after World War II, some continued to keep up with modernism's evolutionary twists and turns through surrealism and paint-splashing abstract expressionism.

Now a valuable and timely exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art demonstrates just how much further Japan's children of the postwar "economic miracle" have gone in breaking the old rules. "Against Nature: Japanese Art in the Eighties" affords American audiences an overdue opportunity to examine some 30 paintings, sculptures and mixed-media works made by nine artists age 40 or younger, plus one artists' collective. The first major U.S. museum showing of new art from Japan in nearly two decades, the exhibition was organized by Thomas Sokolowski of New York University's Grey Art Gallery and Study Center and Kathy Halbreich, formerly of M.I.T.'s List Visual Arts Center, along with Fumio Nanjo of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Nagoya, Japan, and Shinji Kohmoto of the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto. It will run in San Francisco through Aug. 6, then travel to Akron, Boston, Seattle, Cincinnati, New York City and Houston through early 1991.

The survey will probably blast many viewers' assumptions about what Japanese art should look like. Forget about tributes to Mount Fuji or poetic evocations < of the changing seasons. These members of what one Japanese critic has called "the post-Hiroshima generation" have grown up in a technology-driven, fiercely consumerist, information-saturat ed urban setting far removed, spiritually if not physically, from Mother Nature. They are city dwellers accustomed at cherry-blossom time each year to seeing decorative artificial flowers attached to electric poles -- right next to real trees. Those based in Tokyo, for example, would be hard-pressed to find any sizable patches of green in the neon-drenched, congested concrete megalopolis that sprawls around their tiny studios. All of the featured artists' works, in subject matter as well as execution, not only defy tradition but in some cases tear it to shreds.

"I'm an urban creature; the countryside frightens me," says Kyoto-born Noboru Tsubaki, whose Fresh Gasoline, 1989, a 9-ft.-high bulbous yellow pod, is the most startling work in the show. The creepy beauty and rich surface texture of Tsubaki's monstrous blob, with tentacle-like branches sprouting from its top, recall a fascination with the grotesque that characterized some Japanese avant-garde art of the 1950s and early '60s. Its inspiration: Japan's bombed-out landscape after World War II. Strains of this extreme aesthetic are still visible today in the ghoulish makeup and gestures of butoh dancers. Similarly, Shoko Maemoto creates souvenirs from a nightmare alley where fairy- tale fantasy meets a haunting eroticism. Meticulously executed, her work has a grisly elegance, as in Silent Explosion, 1988, a mannequin-less burlap hoopskirt from which a torrent of "blood" cascades, blazing, to the floor.

Other artists in the show use the real world as raw material. Charred, rough-edged and yellowed, Shinro Ohtake's mixed-media assemblages and collage- filled scrapbooks seek an awkward beauty in combinations of found objects and unwanted rubbish. Such pieces as his Family Tree, 1986-88, serve as vivid symbols of the appropriationist free-for-all that is Japanese pop culture today -- a tsunami of Mickey Mouse trinkets, teriyaki burgers, Picasso calendars, Swatches and more. They are also dispassionate records of life in what Ohtake calls an "information supermarket," an environment in which traditional Japanese cultural values are up for grabs, along with everything else.

This includes Western art history and aspects of Japan's own cultural past. Osaka native Yasumasa Morimura, for example, places himself as the main character in carefully staged and photographed "reproductions" of well-known Western paintings like Manet's Olympia. Tomiaki Yamamoto melds brushy abstract expressionism with the pattern-oriented design sensibility of traditional Japanese textiles. Often his splashy tableaux resemble spread-out kimonos. Typically, as in Untitled, 1985, they are covered with an obsessive, all-over rash of heavily impastoed, drippy dots. Far less theatrical but also keenly focused on subject matter and technique, sculptor Katsura Funakoshi creates blank-faced portraits of everyday people whose looks betray neither race nor nationality. Made from camphorwood, his torsos are as skillfully carved as the ancient Buddhist sculptures whose construction they recall. Psychologically intense, they are also a little bit spooky.

Ultimately, even without the thematic weight imposed on these works by the somewhat arbitrary title "Against Nature," this is very much an exhibition about Japanese artists' continuing tug-of-war with the forces of modernism. Its organizers obviously believe that, in responding to the world around them, today's Japanese artmakers are answering to a personal, not a prescribed, vision of how to depict it. Perhaps, in a modern world, this approach is only natural.