Kinuko Emi
Kinuko Emi was a Japanese painter. Emi is best known for her abstract painting in bold colors featuring the motif of four classical elements. At the 31st Venice Biennale in 1962, Emi's work was exhibited in the Japan Pavilion alongside that of four male artists, making her the first Japanese woman artist to be shown at the country's Pavilion. She had retrospective exhibitions at the Yokohama Civic Art Gallery in 1996, the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura in 2004 and Himeji City Museum of Art in 2010. Emi's works are in the collection of the National Museum of Art, Osaka, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama, Yokohama Museum of Art, and Takamatsu Art Museum, among others. Emi's daughter, Anna Ogino, is an Akutagawa Prize-winning novelist and emeritus professor of French literature at Keio University, Tokyo, who serves as the custodian of her mother's works and legacy.Biography
Early life and education (1923–1950)
Emi was born on June 7, 1923, in Akashi, Hyōgo Prefecture. Emi graduated from Hyogo Prefectural Kakogawa Women's Higher School in 1940. She was a member of the painting club at the school. From 1941 to 1943, Emi studied under Hiroshi Ikawa, a Western-style oil painter who later became a member of the Second Era Society, and from 1945 to 1949, she studied at the Kobe Municipal Western Painting Institute. At the time, Western-style painting was not considered a woman's career and Emi's father strongly opposed his daughter's decision to pursue oil painting after graduation. From 1948 to 1950, Emi worked as a drawing teacher at Kobe Municipal Ota Junior High School.Early career (1950–1953)
In her early career, Emi actively exhibited her works at the annual juried salon hosted by the Kōdō Bijutsu Association. With her figurative female nudes, she quickly moved up the membership ladder of Kōdō Bijutsu. In 1948, after her work was accepted for the first time at Kōdō's 4th exhibition, she moved from Kobe to Yokohama. From 1950 onward, her works were regularly accepted to Kōdō's annual exhibitions; she was awarded the Encouragement Prize at the 5th exhibition in 1950, followed by the Newcomer's Prize at the 6th exhibition in 1951. At the 7th exhibition in 1952, Emi exhibited Crowd that depicted a group of figurative nude women in dark colours, and won the highest prize, Kōdō Bijutsu Prize. In 1953, with these achievements, Emi was made Kōdō's first woman member at the 8th exhibition, where she exhibited another female nude, Three Standing Women. Meanwhile, in 1952, her work was accepted to the annual salon of the Women Artists Association, which led to her membership in the association.International travels (1953–1955)
Emi traveled to the US in November 1953 and held a solo exhibition, Emi Kinuko Gaillard, at the Sausalito Arts Center in Sausalito, California, in February 1954, showing works such as Crowd . Emi later traveled to New York and then to Paris, where she stayed until August 1955. In Paris, Emi frequented the Louvre Museum and she "was astonished by the evidently long tradition of concrete expression in European painting, especially in regard to the nude." Emi was also exposed to contemporary abstract paintings, such as American Abstract Expressionism and French Art Informel or Tachisme. In 1954, when Emi traveled to Southern Europe, she was shocked to see the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira, which led her to reconsider what art is. These visits prompted a great shift in her practice to semi-abstraction, in which the subject is captured in a simplified form. Emi returned to Japan in the fall of 1955.Success as an abstract painter (1956–1967)
After returning to Japan, Emi received greater visibility and opportunities as an abstract painter. Masao Momiya, curator of the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama pointed out: "Certainly were much admired during this period. Nevertheless, the development of abstract painting does not readily indicate her debt to such movements but, rather, speaks to the personal efforts made by a painter who continued to change course in pursuit of a unique mode of expression." Indeed, Emi refused to follow what the critics of the time were appreciating. In 1958, Ichirō Haryū, one of the most influential "Big Three" critics of postwar Japan, visited Emi's solo show and described her Symbol as follows: "Expressive elements are restrained, and an architectural structure consisting of colored rectangular planes and lines is outstanding. Nevertheless, a method of painting powerfully with the palette knife has been intensified and, in conjunction with a collage-like structure, strongly evokes a feeling for materials. This result in a space filled with energy. This particular work consists of two adjoining canvases, and the painter has thoughtfully considered the contrast and balance of left and right." Despite such applause by the influential male critic, Emi "subsequently reversed the two canvases that comprise Symbol and incorporated space between them when they were shown in the Second Shell Art Award Exhibition of 1958." Emi won the third prize for her Symbol at the Second Shell Art Award Exhibition, held at the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura in 1958. She also participated in the 41st Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture in 1958 and the 3rd Guggenheim International Award in 1960. At the 31st Venice Biennale in 1962, Emi became the first Japanese female artist to exhibit at the Japan Pavilion. Although her work was shown alongside four male artists—Minoru Kawabata, Kumi Sugai, Tadashi Sugimata, and Ryōkichi Mukai—her presence was far ahead of its time. The second woman, after Emi, to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale was Yayoi Kusama in 1993, notably also the first Japanese woman artist to hold solo show at the country's Pavilion. Emi developed a variety of original painting techniques over her career. In her Work series shown at the Venice Biennale, for example, Emi invented a unique creative process described as follows: “first, the paint layer is removed from the old paintings by dipping them into the water of a pond; second, the collected paint is dried, ground, and sifted; third the paint particles are mixed with turpentine, left for several days, and then colored by fresh paints such as yellow ochre; fourth, the ground for the new painting is made from the colored mixture applied to a fresh canvas; and fifth, Paynes gray mixed with transparent medium is diluted with turpentine, and then sprinkled over the prepared ground for finishing the work.”Return to figuration (1967–1974)
After the Venice Biennale, Emi occasionally returned to figurative expression. According to Masao Momiya, "the period from 1967 to 1974, during which she made conceptual works and realistic, or illusionistic works—sometimes in the form of shaped canvases—was a difficult time of trial and error." Her return to figuration was partly informed by the rise and fall of materialistic civilization in the 1970s such as the Expo '70 and the Vietnam War.After the trial and error period, Emi returned to abstraction with brighter colors, and from 1975 to 1986, she "purposely incorporated natural actions in her production by employing the 'dissolving' technique to the overall canvas, and she succeeded in expressing her own view of the cosmos." For instance, Emi often "adopted the technique of running turpentine, or paints diluted with turpentine, down the inclined canvas, or dissolving paints with turpentine and then spreading them on the canvas. natural actions such as the mixture and the dissolution of substance and the forces of gravity are introduced to her production as unexpected elements." In 1980, Emi said, “My principal motifs consist of four elements, water, fire, solid, and wind. I am aiming at having a cosmic space appear as an integrating factor among these elements, and I will do so.” Moreover, in 1981 Emi unveiled a series of geometric abstract paintings, bearing titles borrowed from the Rubáiyát, the collected poems of Omar Khayyam, the eleventh and twelfth centuries Persian poet. In the early 1980s, the four elements and the geometric forms appear repeatedly in Emi's paintings.Later years (1987–2015)
Masao Momiya pointed out: "Since 1987, the 'dissolving' technique that had originally applied to the overall canvas has been gradually curtailed to become only one of a number of productive means of the painter. In other words, while unexpected elements of nature, such as the mixture and the dissolution of substances and the forces of gravity have been restrained, the painter's own hand creates overall painting again. In addition, to the 'dissolving' technique, the artist's mixing of wet paints on the canvas, as well as her coaxing of a visual, or optical mixing of the color of the upper paint layer with that of the lower by virtue of their juxtaposition, constitute very skilful traces of the painter's hand." Emi had retrospective exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura in 2004 and Himeji City Museum of Art in 2010. In 2004, Momiya summarized Emi's career as follows: "The evolving creation of the ever-changing painter Kinuko has developed from bright nudes to dark ones; from semi-abstraction to austere geometric abstraction; from minimalist abstraction to an expressionistic utilization of a thick ground; and then to expressive abstraction; then through a time of fluctuation; to a production with natural actions incorporated by employing the 'dissolving' technique; to creation by the painter’s own, sure hand skill. Most recently, in the early twenty-first century, the forms depicted in canvases have become freer and freer and the hues brighter and brighter." Emi died on January 13, 2015, in Yokohama, at the age of 91.