Koji Yamamoto's Old Pine
Tatsuru Uchida
Old Pine is a theme that Koji Yamamoto has been painstakingly working on since 2011. Yamamoto sometimes creates series based on the same theme, as if possessed by it. When I first saw one of his individual exhibitions in the 1990s, he was painting a series called Canti, Circle, Tree, based on these geometric forms. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, he created a series called Another Nature, inspired by the forms brought about by the generation of plants. It was around that time that I asked Yamamoto to create Old Pine, and I would like to explain how that came about.
When I retired from the university, I decided to open a martial arts dojo and devote the rest of my life to coaching martial arts. My dojo, which I called Gaifukan, has an area the size of 80 tatami mats. My wife is a Noh theater artist, a kozutsumi drummer of the Okura School, and I myself sometimes enjoy Noh performances of the Kanze School, so I asked the architect to plan the dojo so that it could also be used as a rehearsal space. This is not difficult from a technical point of view.
Simply removing a section of tatami three mats by six mats in area, a total of 18 mats in area, allowed us to create a floor of cypress boards. We use that part as a Noh stage and the rest as a walkway for the actors and seating for the audience. That's all there is to it. However, the space was missing an important element that would make it a Noh stage, an “old pine.”
A Noh stage invariably has an old pine painted in the background. I don't know whether there is an established explanation about why a Noh stage must have an old pine in the background. Anyway, every Noh stage in Japan, whether it is in a theater or in a temporary stage out of doors, absolutely must have an old pine. Without that pine, it cannot qualify as a Noh performance.
One of the most common plots in Noh is as follows: A traveling monk (the waki, one of the two principal roles) comes to a land that is haunted by ghosts. Then he encounters a person with a complicated past (the mae-jite, the first guise of the shite, the other principal role). This character responds to the monk's questions by recounting about half of the history of the land but suddenly disappears from the stage. In the second half, this character returns to the stage as a nochi jite, now transformed into a god, demon, or ghost. The nochi jite then continues the story of how he came to this fate while chanting and dancing. Upon finishing his narration, he disappears, as if the whole play were a single dream.
If I were to describe the basic form of Noh, I would describe it as a situation in which life and death, reality and fantasy, or logic and emotion encounter each other in a special place, come into conflict, enter into a dialogue, become intertwined, and eventually separate and return beyond their separate boundaries. We can guess from this theatrical structure why an old pine has been chosen as a background for the Noh stage.
That is because the old pine is a plant in which death and life coexist. It is brimming with life, as shown by its beautiful green needles, but its trunk is already hollowing out and dying. Pine needles are straight lines like pins, but the branches and trunk are strangely twisted, as if bent by a playful giant. Life and death, things that are born and things that pass away, purity and maturity—all coexist in the same tableau, making an old pine an exceptional theme.
At the earliest stages, we had decided that we wanted Koji Yamamoto to paint our old pine when we made our Noh stage. We thought it would be a matter of course, but after he readily agreed to our request, we recalled that he had never once painted a tableau with a specified subject. We were resigned to hearing him refuse by saying, “I paint what I want to paint.
I don't do anything like painting a designated theme.” But that is not what he did. I think that is because he directly sensed some ties linking Another Nature, which he was working on at the time, and Old Pine. ( I haven't confirmed this with Yamamoto.)
I had formerly received a rather detailed explanation from Yamamoto himself about the motifs on which the Another Nature series is based on. At that time, he told me in a low voice what marvelous structures the veins and serrated edges of leaves were, drawing pencil drawings in his sketchbook as I watched. Until then, I had never heard Koji Yamamoto talk so enthusiastically about the shapes of “things that exist.” Yamamoto is an abstract artist. I had never asked him why he doesn't paint actual objects but has chosen the technique of filling his tableaux with nothing but abstract images and colors. That is because I sensed that his response would be, “An artist chooses a technique, and the reason that he did not choose other techniques is a question that he cannot answer on the spot.”
Yamamoto, who had continued painting only abstract figures, found that the forms of actual objects from the natural world strongly stimulated his desire to create. The first tentative effort was a single leaf. That was a shape that only life can produce. It is a shape that only the ceaselessly flowing processes of birth, growth, deterioration, and withering can create. I do not think that his strong attraction to these themes is unconnected with his experiences just before that of becoming ill and lingering on the boundary between life and death.
Until then, Yamamoto had striven to incorporate movement and flow into his abstract images. I came up with a hypothesis that he was motivated by a certain artistic ambition that made him want to incorporate something that could not be represented in two dimensions, name “time,” in this paintings. Some time ago, I wrote that in an essay that I submitted for inclusion in the catalogue of Yamamoto's solo exhibition. Yet in his works before Another Nature, the flow of time was, in the end, confined to “motion” within the image. If one merely wants to express motion, one can do so in, for example, a mobile or video art. Yamamoto wanted to make the flow of time take shape in the painting in a different form. At a certain stage, he came to the conclusion that motion by itself was insufficient for symbolizing the flow of time and that he could not accomplish this unless he painted the actual life processes of living things. I think that Yamamoto may have been working in that direction during that period.
I think that Old Pine fortuitously combined the technical achievements of the Another Nature series with the artist's illness and our request for creating a work on a specific theme, and thus opened the way for new technical horizons. The concept is still that of symbolizing the flow of time in figures. But ever since his major illness (and the death of Tsuyoshi Isoe, his closest friend and artistic colleague from his days in Spain) the “flow of time” formerly inspired by the life processes of plants, has been replaced by what for Yamamoto is rather the notion of “time remaining until death.”
Yamamoto's creative ambition to capture on canvas things that only living and dying things can assume and the restrictions of painting a background for the Noh theater where life and death interact served as the impetus for his Old Pine series. The old pine in Gaifukan is the first work in the series. Since then, Yamamoto has been displaying tremendous energy in continuing to produce works in the Old Pine series. Each work is more polished and bolder than the previous one. This is not something that happens repeatedly to any artist. I believe that Koji Yamamoto
has discovered his “vein of ore.” I am happy to think that I supplied him with one of his motifs, even though I did so unintentionally.
