Takako Azami: Weaving Wind and Light

Over the last decade, Takako Azami has focused on the subject of various trees in her suibokuga, or sumi ink painting. Her paintings, however, are far from typical illustrations found in a botanical encyclopedia, where one can easily identify the kind of tree. Of course, it may be possible for those who have very observant eyes to discern approximately what kind of tree it is by just looking at the overall shape of leaves, which consist of numerous ink dots and the spread of branches drawn in thin lines. Yet calling Azami’s work merely a “painting of a tree” may lead to overlooking the fundamental essence of her painting.

For example, there is a large-scale painting created in New York in 2008. It is called “Pine Trees“. An up-close view reveals a gathering of dots in all sizes and gradations in tone from dark black to light grey. White lines that are left unpainted or prepared with chalk pigment and glue crisscross over those dots in an unregulated way. But the viewer who steps away from the painting by several feet would recognize that these abstract forms start assuming an image of trees. The thick sumi ink line from the center to lower left makes one think of a pine tree trunk that is never straight, while thin lines in light gray and white seem to correspond to pine needles and branches spread out in all directions. Such a complex collection of dots and lines will never be automatically recognized in our memory as a “pine tree” because a “pine tree” in our memory consists of ever-changing impressions of a tree in different climatic conditions. Hence, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Azami represents the way the air around the tree changes rather than focusing on the specificity of the tree itself. This is rather like the Impressionist Monet, who dedicated himself to painting haystacks at different times of the day.

There is a slight difference in the air and temperature between Brooklyn and Queens, even though the two boroughs exist within the relatively limited boundaries of New York City. The temperature gap between Vermont and New York may be compared to that between Hokkaido and Tokyo. During her recent sojourns in these varied locales, Azami refined her sensitivity toward environmental differences and established her fundamental attitude in art making; her process remains unaffected no matter whether she is in Japan or in the United States. Her dedication to art making transcends the East-West cultural divide, as well as the existing limitations in the reception overseas of Japanese sumi ink painting.

Azami’s exhibition opportunities outside Japan prominently increased after her first solo exhibition in New York, which was held at M.Y. Art Prospects Gallery in December 2001, closely following the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. In 2005, she had a major solo exhibition at Gertsev Gallery in Moscow, which was received enthusiastically by a local audience. This year, she has been chosen to be among eleven artists featured in the annual exhibition of contemporary sumi ink painting, “Suibokuga Today 2009,” organized by the Suiboku Museum, Toyama, which has traveled to Nerima Art Museum in Tokyo. Furthermore, she is returning to M.Y. Art Prospects Gallery for another solo exhibition. These achievements should not be taken for granted considering the fact that only a few Japanese sumi ink painters have been rewarded with international exhibition opportunities.

Azami’s paintings, spare in their representation, have sought the essence of nature in ways that may remind the viewer of an early 20th-century series by Piet Mondrian, in which trees were increasingly abstracted; Helen Frankenthaler’s large canvases, stained with sponges dipped in paint, in the mid-20th century; and Agnes Martin’s series of white paintings covered with intricate pencil lines from the 1960s. Like Mondrian and Martin, both of whom invented their clear-cut abstractions by the use of grid lines, Azami created her own system consisting of dots and lines. Not unlike Frankenthaler, Azami created a non-flat, certain spatial depth with a rich texture in her painting surface by letting the ink saturate from the back of hemp paper to the front. Hence, it would be simplistic to search for her aesthetic roots within the ink painting tradition just because of her medium. Her current work does incorporate techniques that she learned at university from Nihonga, or Japanese style painting, such as the use of chalk pigment and gold leaf. When she employs these materials, however, they are so defused that we may overlook them unless we pay our utmost attention.

In order to capture her senses’ perceptions at different times, Azami is not afraid of melding nihonga and suibokuga freely into one process and adding renovations to the combination. Although it is important to preserve these separate traditions, she chooses to concoct a new expression, one that suits an individual living in the contemporary world. By inventing a method of painting that involves both sides of paper, she has even obtained, according to her own words, the feeling of “sewing a picture” as if she were “weaving wind and light.”