ART REVIEW : Japanese Display Artfulness in Santa Monica Museum

There is really nothing new about the current Western fascination with Japan. It has been thus ever since the French Impressionists discovered Japanese prints in the curio shops of Paris. Neither is there much novelty in the fact that our fascination focuses on Japanese art. Japan and its art have become synonymous in the Western mind.

Germany can be conceived without thinking art, not so Japan.

The latest round of beguilement seems to have a new twist. Japan’s formidable economic clout has given Western business types the notion that they have something to learn from Japan. That is new only by extension. French artists learned from Japanese prints and it changed and broadened our art. Our respect for Japanese art has simply expanded to include respect for Japanese artfulness.

Westerners who feel uneasy in the situation should see a significant spate of relevant exhibitions recently blossomed in this springtime city. They range from traditional material at the County Museum of Art to the radical architecture of Artata Isozaki at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The latest entry is “Seven Artists: Aspects of Contemporary Japanese Art,” just opened at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. The traveling show was organized by Kazuo Yamawaki, senior curator of the Nagoya City Art Museum as part of the L.A.-Nagoya sister city program, and coordinated here by Noriko Fujinami.

Clear evidence emerges in the galleries. This work looks the way it does because contemporary Japanese artists have learned a lot from the West. “We are interested in Western trends,” writes Yamawaki, “not because they are Western, but because we think of the West as the center of the international art scene in which we are equal participants.”

So there you are. The new Japanese art sees itself as neither quite Oriental nor specifically Occidental but as part of a third thing, the floating world of Internationalism. It bears the fruits of a multilingual dialogue in which East and West learn from one another in round-robin order.

Sounds good. Sounds tolerant and cosmopolitan. It also sounds the sour note of a world full of look-alike intercontinental hotels where everything is comfortably familiar except a sense of where you are. Excuse me, madame, is this Brussels or Kyoto?

Actually, the matter on view suggests there is little danger of truly boring homogenization, but you do have to look a bit harder.

Somebody trying to view the exhibition on roller skates might mistake a Kosho Ito for a Richard Long, but anybody that superficial deserves their ignorance anyway. Ito is 58 and among the senior contingent of artists on board. He’s had a long and respected career, as have the others. In a way it’s a shame to be introduced to a mature talent by just one work, but that is a generic problem with this sort of show. Installations take up a lot of room.

Ito’s is called “Fraternization and Undulation.” It consists of a 20-foot diameter circle made up of thin, wavy shards of white ceramic. It could be a fluttering sea of silk in a Kabuki play or a pond thrashed by the tails of a thousand startled Koi. As you walk around it, the bone-white color changes, blushing blue-gray. From one angle the whole thing looks like it’s about to implode into its own center.

It’s not only the single most successful work on view, it also embodies a lexicon of characteristics typical of Japanese art. It makes little distinction between crafts and fine art. It uses frankly artificial means to create effects that seem as much like the work of nature as that of man.

Collaborating with nature is central to the Japanese aesthetic. It gives the work a quality of inevitability, and the artists the aura of exercising elemental force. They operate like wind, fire or water. At best, this art escapes a kind of constricting individuality and becomes broadly philosophical. Inherent decorative qualities make it poetic.

Maiko Yamaguchi is 64. He sculpts gorgeous black granite into simple leaning slabs and crouching blocks. They could be anything from primitive ancestral grave markers to traditional lingams or heroic benches. You may find some Brancusi or Scott Burton lurking around somewhere but you don’t catch them nicking a surface, so it looks like falling autumnal leaves or red snow.

At 54, Korean-born Lee Ufan was the founder of the pivotal “Mono-ha” group and has had the widest international exposure among the group. He’s represented by a suite of paintings called, “With Winds.” One canvas is blank, others bear just few simple gray strokes, now clustering, now clinging to an edge or slumping to the bottom of the canvas. Anyone who takes them for bleached Monet’s or oversize abstract Philip Guston’s should take in the traditional Zen painting show at LACMA. Ufan is just as spontaneous if a trifle more discouraged.

If some of these artists embody earth and water, 52-year-old Satoru Shoji takes wing on the winds. His “Navigation--Flight No. 4” is a delicate concoction of cloth, rope and slender wood struts where Leonardo’s flying machine meets a geisha’s parasol.

The more seasoned artists might be seen as seeking the consolation of nature. The younger contingent seem preoccupied with the drama and tragedy of life.

Chie Matsui is the single woman included. Her installation, “Channel,” takes up the most space. You enter a room lined with canvas painted to resemble stained metal. There is a dias-like whitened brick staircase. Tresses of blue and white fiber drape across it. A hexagon of light falls like a spotlight. It comes from a peephole opening lined with mirror. It feels like Nabokov’s “Invitation to a Beheading” as rendered by Lady Murasaki.

A whitewashed corridor turns back on itself. Hexagonal peepholes give a hint of a chaotic future. At the corner rests another dramatic fall of blue hair. For the rest of the distance there is nothing to look back on. A pile of white hair lies at the end. It’s about life as a graceful ceremonial journey to oblivion. At least it was beautiful.

Chu Enkoi and Toshihiro Kuno seem preoccupied with war. Kuno shows a circular wall of plastic sandbags surrounding a floor of coiled rope. Could be about any kind of fortification that keeps people from seeing fully.

Enkoi’s piece is called “Cartridges.” It’s a study in contrasts. Two glass cases enclose ranks of big bullets, polished and glamorous, standing on scarlet cloth. They bespeak the way ceremony is used to make war appear glorious. The other half is a mound of spent shells so artfully arranged it could be a boat, a landscape or a pile of grain. It all comes back to nature, which heals and recycles human foolishness.

The show probably looks Western in Japan. Here it looks Japanese. That idea might annoy the artists. We all want to be individuals. Still, we can’t quite get away from our genes or the place we came from.