Hiroshi Senju by Sundaram Tagore Gallery

H I R O S H I

S E N J U

G M

A I

L S

E I

R O

Y N

Established in 2000, Sundaram Tagore Gallery is devoted to examining the exchange of ideas between Western and non-Western cultures. We focus on developing exhibitions and hosting not-for-profit events that encourage spiritual, social and aesthetic dialogues. In a world where communication is instant and cultures are colliding and melding as never before, our goal is to provide venues for art that transcend boundaries of all sorts. With alliances across the globe, our interest in cross-cultural exchange extends beyond the visual arts into many other disciplines, including poetry, literature, performance art, film and music.

T BY

I AI N

R O B E RTS O N

When we encounter great art we are often lost for words. That is because great art is truth and truth leaves us dumbstruck. The English poet William Cowper (1731-1800) had this to say about it: Man, on the dubious waves of errour toss’d His ship half founder’d, and his compass lost, Sees far as human optics may command, A sleeping fog, and fancies it dry land Hiroshi Senju’s paintings of waterfalls are as deceptive as sleeping fog but unencumbered by artifice and unadorned with ornament; they are majestic in their simplicity and cannot be confused for what they are not. The artist’s recently completed series of monumental paintings called simply Falling Water, recreates the overwhelming force of matter. These works are primordial visions of the birth of nature. The great bars of pigment that divide the canvas like slipware, capture the passage of water and freeze the movement. Great stalactites guard the void behind which lie the grotto-heaven and the land of the immortals. Cowper would have undoubtedly approved of the integrity of Senju and the honesty that is manifest in his paintings. There is a difference between the overpowering sensation of the sublime and the quiet truth that art, at its best, relates to us.

Beauty is truth and truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know [John Keats, 1795-1821] The great deluge that Senju captures is both man and nature, the artist and his subject as one. It is not a study of objective reality and therefore not sublime, but a part of the process of creation that forms the everyday life of the artist in his ordered Westchester, New York, studio. Senju’s art takes shape out of his routine practice. The light that emanates from his translucent works carries the treasured qualities of inherent luminescence of the minerals that are ground to form iwaenogu, a natural pigment made of crushed oyster shells, coral and semi-precious stones. Senju applies this compound to Japanese rice paper or fibrous, kozo-type mulberry-bark paper, backed by board, with an animal-hide glue. All this, not for the sake of archaism, but to ensure that the color glows and shines with an inner light—and, perhaps more importantly, that the color endures. Conspicuous as the brightness of a star, Legible only by the light they give. The happy match of materials allows the artist to release his energy onto the surface area. The paint, which he pours down the canvas as it rests on bricks and against a wall at a slight angle, is delineated

Left: Waterfall, 2009, fluorescent pigments on mulberry paper mounted on board, 71.5 x 89.5 inches. In 2007 the artist began working with fluorescent paint, which turns an arresting electric blue under ultraviolet light.

by the calligraphic strokes of a Chinese brush, toothbrush or comb. The entire surface area is coated in shimmering luminous white, blue, green, orange or yellow pigment. The free-flow of energy or chi (qi) essential to the maintenance of health and to purity of expression is integral to Senju’s paintings. There is another element, which is related to chi, present in the best art and craft and existing in Senju’s art— and that is a sense of continuity and change. Water provides the best metaphor to illustrate the haiku verse of Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) and his acceptance of fueki ryuko (continuity and change). The falls that Senju captures are not moving organisms or natural wonders in the manner of Turner’s seascapes so much as poetic odes to the gradual, imperceptible change in nature, be it a rock or water. Nature, and by extension the universe, changes unbeknown to us, but it is everlasting. There is continuity in the artist’s decision to create work in a series, and there is a sense that like the works themselves, the subject matter, a churning ocean of primeval matter, has no beginning and no end.

is absent from the rushing brook. Fu Baoshi’s (1904-1965) turbulent depictions in the 1960s of the northern Chinese falls of Changbai and Jingpo, descending from the Heavenly Lake, are as much an expression of his inner turmoil as they are a vision of the force of nature. The void that his threads and plates of water leave are spaces set free from life’s distractions, an empty, not a lonely place. A place in which truth resides. And so it is with Hiroshi Senju’s falls.

At the top of Senju’s falls it is tempting to think sit the Shinto kami (gods), controlling nature’s moods and our destiny. Japan has been blighted by natural disaster for millennia and its people have had to collectively accept the mercurial intervention of a force far greater than them. So the gods of nature are very real in the Japanese imagination. The mountain can represent the Amida Buddha, an equivalent of the kami and synonymous with the Pure Land Paradise. Perhaps a floating land of immortals and bodhisattvas awaits unseen at the crest of Senju’s smoky haze.

Go—bid the winter cease to chill the year, Replace the wandering comet in his sphere

The waterfall or mountain stream and the rock are very significant devices in traditional Asian art. The surging river that slices through a vertical landscape adds dynamism to the mountain range, but also interrupts its substance. The virtuoso brush painter’s lexicon of strokes

Though various foes against Truth combine, Pride above all opposes her design; Pride, of a growth superior to the rest, The subtlest serpent with the loftiest crest Senju’s frothing falls are uninterrupted voids, galaxies of minerals, that refute man’s attempt to record his environment and command his universe;

There is no place for pride or delusion under the torrent of crystalline vapor that Senju sends cascading down his monumental works. The extraordinary and the true appear in everyday surroundings. Senju’s falls can be found in an Osaka railway station, an old Kyoto temple or suspended high above the passengers in Tokyo’s international airport. They adorn the fusuma (sliding doors) of his house reconstructed in the seventeenth-century shoin-zukuri style and they appear as monochrome water curtains on the fusuma at Philadephia’s Shofuso Japanese House and Garden showing again the strong link that the artist’s paintings have to tradition, but also to the particular sensitivities of the commission. The color of Senju’s paintings was drawn from the

colors of the house and garden. His work also forms an integrated gesamtkunstwerk with the architecture of Ryue Nishizawa in the Hiroshi Senju Museum in Karuizawa. The artist’s waterfalls nestle within the anthropomorphic form of Nishizawa’s interior of glass and white walls. Nature intrudes throughout the space and the trees provide a fitting complement to his striking display of waterfalls. Natural light permeates the environment, changing the hue and tone of the works. The subtle graduations of natural light and the changing mood of the works as day turns to dusk give an impression, like Monet’s Nymphéas cycle in the Orangerie in Paris and Turner’s depiction of the phantomlike Napoleon on St Helena in the Clore Gallery in London’s Tate Britain, of impermanence. The Falling Water paintings in the Day Falls/Night Falls exhibition (2013) continue the artist’s interest in unnatural light that he first expressed in the show Haruka Naru Aoi Hikari (New Light from Afar, 2007, at Sundaram Tagore New York). A light that man has created. And so Senju responds by painting these pictures in fluorescent pigments that look black and white in daylight and glow electric blue under ultraviolet light, creating an ebullition of phosphorescent liquid foam. These falls drink in the electric lights of the neon-clad night-time city and allude to the world’s newest global metropolises: Tokyo, Hong Kong and Seoul. They are alarming reflections on the changing nature of light; on the commoditisation of light. The solitary and stark qualities of his current series envelop the viewer. The falls appear in suspended animation, poised between day and night; odes to the sleepless city. The ambiguity between the certainty and hope of a Taoist heaven and nihilism is felt for the first time in Falling Water. The indeterminateness creates a tension absent from previous paintings and marks them out as the most ambitious body of work to date. Hiroshi Senju leaves us with a sense that man’s dualism will be his undoing and that nature, if

we would but listen, is our early-warning system. All that we think man has invented can be found in nature. The artist draws our attention to the ethereal light that emanates from bioluminescent fish and fungi in the blackness of ocean deep. The explosion of color in the Falling Water paintings recalls a bowl, Sosei (Genesis), made in 1991 by the Japanese porcelain artist Tokuda Yasokichi III (b. 1933), in which he overlays the eggshell white clay with vivid color glazes to produce a dramatic marriage of color and form. Part of the joy of Senju’s art lies in the craft-based construction and attention to detail apparent in all his paintings and the simplicity of his vision. An artist who has the confidence to express himself economically, and in such a manner that each mark and gesture has significance should be admired because these skills are very rare today. Pride falls unpitied, never more to rise; Humility is crown’d, and Faith receives the prize.

Falling Water, 2013, acrylic and fluorescent pigments on Japanese mulberry paper, 38.2 x 51.3 inches