Artist Kamisaka Sekka's work reflected a new Japan

THE Art Gallery of NSW's exhibition is the first in Australia devoted to the work of Kamisaka Sekka.

Kamisaka Sekka

THE Art Gallery of NSW's exhibition is the first in Australia devoted to the work of Kamisaka Sekka (1866-1942), an artist and designer whose life and career unfolded almost entirely within the extraordinary period in Japanese history that began with the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and ended with World War II and the catastrophic defeat from which modern Japan emerged.

After an initial period of contact with the West during the 16th and early 17th centuries, Japan had been closed to foreign influences for 200 years - centuries during which the modern world evolved in Europe and America - until that new world became impossible to ignore in the latter part of the 19th century.

The old feudal order was swept away as the emperor, long a symbolic figure, reasserted his authority, and Japan embarked on an astonishingly rapid period of modernisation and Westernisation.

Japan's transformation was remarkable by any standards, and especially so for a society that has always been very conservative.

But the whole process in fact tells us much about Japan - which would have to undergo another wrenching transformation after defeat in 1945 - as well as about sophisticated cultures in general. It demonstrates a capacity to distinguish between superficial adaptation and deep values, to be flexible about some aspects of social organisation and belief while holding firm to the most important ones.

Almost overnight, the civil service, army and navy were rebuilt on Western lines - adopting, with typical Japanese thoroughness and pragmatism, the best models, so that the new fleet was based on the Royal Navy; an alliance between Japan and Britain ensued in 1902, and in 1905 the Imperial Navy destroyed the Russian fleet at Tsushima, the first time since the 18th century that an oriental power had defeated a European one.

In 1910 Kamisaka Sekka was sent to Glasgow, with its famous School of Art, as part of the same program of contact with the modern world, and his importance in Japanese art is in the way he used this experience of the modern West as a way of rediscovering and renewing aspects of Japanese tradition. Western artists had already been influenced, of course, by the Japanese woodblock prints known as ukiyo-e, popular in Europe from about the time of Sekka's birth.

These coloured woodblocks, finely executed but in Japan inexpensive views of famous landscapes, portraits of courtesans and pictures of the so-called "floating world" of the Yoshiwara pleasure district in Edo, were in their turn a fascinating example of cultural exchange, since the perspectival effects that they used for such distinctively decorative purposes were originally borrowed from Western models. They were reappropriated by the impressionists and others as inspiration for compositional solutions in paintings that were no longer primarily concerned with rational perspective.

Sekka's own inspiration came from the Japanese tradition of Rinpa, and the first room of the exhibition is devoted to an understanding of this style, which was originally developed in the 17th century and was in many respects inspired by the earlier and more stylised decorative painting of the Heian period - the idiom used in the illustration of Heian classics such as the 11th-century Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari).

Two closely related things are perhaps particularly striking about the Rinpa aesthetic, from the point of view of a non-specialist. One is that it can be manifested in high art and in a variety of what we might consider design media: not only in painted scrolls and gilded screens but in lacquerware and ceramics. The other is that Rinpa is a decorative style and is the work of a class of professional artists or artisans.

The difference between artist and artisan is hardly applicable in the case of Rinpa, but it is relevant in distinguishing Rinpa from the Chinese-inspired ink painting, which was traditionally the preserve of amateurs and scholars. The Chinese tradition is probably the only one in which the amateur always outranked the professional.

Ink painting is a kind of poetic meditation on nature that is executed entirely with brush and ink, the same materials used in writing, so that pictures are naturally accompanied by poems - a unique fusion of art and poetry that can never be achieved in the Western tradition.

Although we can see the influence of ink-painting in the forms of trees and other landscape elements in Rinpa work, we find ourselves in a very different aesthetic, in which landscapes are executed in coloured paint rather than ink, and consequently seldom if ever accompanied by poems, even though several Rinpa artists were also fine calligraphers.

Nevertheless, even in the hanging scrolls, we can appreciate two different levels of decoration, in the images themselves and in the framing designs. Trees, birds and insects form the principal motifs, and they are arranged in long diagonal sweeps on the page: there is seldom any strong sense of the ground, no horizon and no sense of depth. It is an aesthetic that is particularly well suited to screen painting.

In the scrolls, however, these painted motifs are further framed with woven fabrics in elaborate and geometrical designs. These designs are deliberately stylised, which is to say that elements from the natural world are consciously transformed into pattern, into formal ideas.

And so there is a contrast, which is particularly appealing to the Japanese sensibility, between the semi-naturalism of the painted motif - in which art tries to embrace the characteristic forms of the things represented - and the radical stylisation of the framing patterns, in which art draws the things of the natural world back into its own universe of formal design.

Sekka's work is deeply rooted in this older tradition, although you feel he is sometimes brighter and simpler in his sense of design - all features that make him feel more modern while still remaining faithful to a deeply Japanese spirit. His pair of screens adorned with fan designs still echoes a Heian style in the representation of the figures, and thus recalls earlier screens with episodes from the story of Genji, for example, but Sekka's images appear more generic and ultimately decorative in nature.

Like his predecessors, Sekka worked in a wide range of media, from painting and woodblock to lacquerware and ceramics. And as in the older tradition, one can see the characteristic Japanese alternation of formal and informal design - the latter particularly in some of the ceramic wares, whose effect comes partly from spontaneity in execution and from the accidents of firing.

In the middle of the exhibition, a reconstruction of a Japanese room says more about the specific qualities of Japanese culture than a long explanatory panel could hope to do: traditional rooms are measured by the number of tatami mats they include, and this is a six-mat room. It is bare of furniture because dining tables and bedding are brought in and removed as required.

At the far end of the room is the tokonoma, the recess or bay in which a scroll is hung and traditionally changed according to the seasons. A flower arrangement is displayed in a vase and, of course, the arrangement of flowers is itself an art (ikebana), governed both by sensitivity to the natural life of the plants and by formal artifice. As I observed on another occasion, Japanese culture is a remarkable amalgam of nature and art, spontaneity and ceremony, which is epitomised in the way simple and even rustic ceramic cups can be used in a tea ceremony that is choreographed in the most formal manner.

Among Sekka's works are not only ceramics but, intriguingly, a set of designs for ceramic bowls, in which the design is superimposed on an outline of the bowl shape, so we can appreciate the way the painted form is meant to embrace the body of the bowl, flowing around it with characteristically asymmetrical grace.

Some of the particular works I have referred to, incidentally, may not be on display by the time this review is published, both because they are fragile and cannot be on display for too long, and because the volume of work is too great to show all at once. Consequently a rehanging of the main part of the exhibition will have taken place, with a different selection of work on view in the second month of the exhibition.

This change will not affect the section of the exhibition held upstairs in the upper Asian Gallery, and which is something of an epilogue charting the influence of Sekka and the modern Rinpa style in post-war Japanese art. It includes a range of textiles and fashion designs and works by various contemporary painters and other artists who have adapted screen painting to include objects and motifs from the consumer world of modern Japan. The result is not always a happy one because these mass-produced industrial objects are not capable of transformation into pattern in the same way as natural things, or even the products of handicraft; they remain in the image as unassimilated, undigested and unpictorial foreign matter.

The main section of the exhibition concludes with what is often considered Sekka's masterpiece, a series of three woodblock books, published in 1909-10 under the title Momoyagusa, translated as A World of Things. Each volume contains 20 images, for a total of 60 plates. Many of the original drawings are displayed in the exhibition as well as copies of the three published volumes.

The images themselves tell no obvious story and have a striking simplicity in which the viewer can appreciate aspects of Sekka's modernist influence. Yet the images themselves are utterly imbued with the spirit of Japan and its tradition. Some are pictures of nature, evocations of the seasons. Some represent everyday life, with peasants working in the country or a traveller walking with difficulty through a snowstorm. Others again seem like recollections of an older Japan, images already impregnated with nostalgia.

As you proceed from page to page, one is taken on a kind of journey through a country and its memories, each like a distinct glimpse into another aspect of the world of Japan. But although the work is like a succession of glimpses, the layout, in which each image occupies the whole double-page opening of the book, and the pictorial field extends to the edge of the page without a border, induces a sense of absorption. Even Sekka's characteristic use of emptiness, in which the blank paper is brought to life as part of the image, conspires to involve the viewer; contemporary, historical or more than anything else timeless, A World of Things is, in its combination of intensity and seeming informality, quintessentially Japanese.

Kamisaka Sekka: Dawn of Modern Japanese Design
Art Gallery of NSW until August 26