“We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the pattern of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.”
Written in the 1930’s, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki essay In Praise of Shadows was a sort of defense for traditional Japanese aesthetics, which he saw as being under threat from the excessively lit modern world. All the highly refined traditional Japanese arts – such as laquerware or noh theatre – he said, should be appreciated under dim lights, but as the West is forever striving for progress it searches for greater clarity and more dazzling light. Despite all the flashing neon and lasers of Japan today, Jun’ichirō might actually be pleasantly surprised to find that the Japanese still hold that particular sensitivity to subdued aesthetics, and the quality of the subtle interplay between light and shadows has not, as he feared, been forgotten.
A recent exhibition at the National Art Center Tokyo placed the work of abstract painter Yoko Matsumoto (b. 1936) and photographer Rika Noguchi (b. 1971) side by side in a show called The Light. Though from different generations, both of these contemporary artists have been primarily concerned with the difficult challenge of capturing light, either in paint or on film. Matsumoto painted exclusively with pink acrylics for several decades before recently moving to green tones and oil paints, and her large-scale canvases have a textured luminosity that is lost in the reproductions here. Noguchi works exclusively with natural light in her photography, often directly documenting the biggest light of them all, the sun, with a pinhole camera. The show received some criticism for putting these two seemingly disconnected artists together under the possibly tenuous link of ‘capturing light’, but it served as an interesting documentation of the great sensitivity to light that still runs strong in contemporary Japan.
