Tatsuo Kawaguchi

Tatsuo Kawaguchi (河口龍夫, Kawaguchi Tatsuo, born in 1940, Kobe Japan) is a Japanese multidisciplinary artist, whose practice often involves the use of objects and the investigation of materials. After studying painting at Tama Art University, Kawaguchi's diverse oeuvre has included drawing, sculpture, installation, photography, and video. He also co-founded the Group "i", a Kobe-based artistic collective, in 1965.

Kawaguchi's early work explored visual perception, principally through the use of objects and mirrors. After 1970, he began using the word "relation" (関係, kankei) in the titles of his works. Kawaguchi seeks to put on display the fragile relationships between the visible and the invisible that create the world around us. The artist intends for his works - which have employed both man-made elements such as lightbulbs or motors, as well as natural elements like stone, wood, seeds and metals - to be perceived of as perpetual works in progress, transforming with time. Environmental anxiety has also informed the development of Kawaguchi's "relation" works. After the Chernobyl disaster, the artist has continuously enveloped various objects, such as seeds, plants, soil, or tools, in lead, a material that protects against radiation.

Kawaguchi's work has featured in major international exhibitions and has been associated by art historians with artistic movements such as land art, minimalism and Mono-ha. Kawaguchi has also been identified as belonging to the loosely-affiliated Gainen-ha (Conceptual School), alongside Yutaka Matsuzawa, Jiro Takamatsu, Kazuo Okazaki, Saburo Muraoka (with whom he collaborated in 1973), Isamu Wakabayashi, and Aiko Miyawaki.

Kawaguchi was awarded the First Iue Culture Prize for Art and Culture in 1974 as well as the Prize of Japan Arts Foundation in 2008. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Tsukuba, Institute of Art and Design. He lives and works in Chiba City.

Early career

Paintings and works with mirrors, 1962-1970 Born in Kobe, Kawaguchi studied painting at Tama University of Fine Art, Tokyo, where he graduated with a BFA in 1962. From 1962 to 1965 he primarily created non-figurative paintings. His compositions are structured by bands of alternating colors, upon which the artist painted repetitive geometric forms. Certain paintings, especially those executed in black and white, show Kawaguchi's interest in optical illusions, as he arranges patterns and colors to suggest new shapes within the composition.

Art critic Akira Tatehata describes these early paintings as "illusive," arguing that the artist's taste for the conceptual can already be sensed: "His mechanical repetitions of circles, triangles, stripes and other sign units, while light and rhythmical, even humorous, are at the same time quite inorganically austere, decidedly imparting a chill to the pictorial space."

During this period, Kawaguchi also engaged in some sculptural work. While teaching at a middle school in 1964, a student who had cast his hand in plaster struggled to remove it from the hardening mass. The artist kept and subsequently painted the mold with the imprint of the boy's hand, considering it a "monument taken from the student's life, an experience of human growth and time never seen again."

Group "i" Group "i" (グループ〈位〉, guruppu "i") was co-founded by Kawaguchi in Kobe in 1965, alongside eight other young artists: Inoue Haruyuki, Okuda Yoshimi, Takeuchi Hirokuni, Toyohara Yasuo, Nakata Makoto, Mukai Takeshi, Murakami Masami, and Yoshida Tsutomu. During an interview, Kawaguchi stated that the use of the kanji 位 in the collective's name came from words such as 単位 (tani, meaning unit), 位置 (ichi, meaning place or position) and 位相 (isō, meaning phase). Each member was thus considered as a "unit" within the group.

Group "i" exhibited collectively seven times between 1965 and 1968. When the digging was finished, the members filled the hole back up. Art critic Yusuke Nakahara stated that Hole "negated the individuality of the members," a recurring motivation in the group's body of work.

The group published "The Manifesto for Non-Sensual Thought" in 1966, which states: "We are dedicated to the non-sensual, and announce that we will think in accordance with magnified consciousness [...] In order to be conscious of something other than the self, thought is necessary; not the senses." Nakahara argued that the work also interrogates language. The photographs, showing the transformation of the shoreline as the day drifts on, "[point out] that a shoreline has no substance [...] it suggests the estrangement of 'shoreline' as a static word and a shoreline as a dynamic image."

Kawaguchi repeatedly employed photography in the early 1970s. His various series capture subtle changes in the natural environment, sometimes occurring naturally, and sometimes provoked by the artist.

Relation works, 1970 - today After 1970, Kawaguchi began frequently titling his works with the word "relation." Rather than simply juxtaposing differing materials, these object-based installations aim to "expose" that which cannot be seen. Masachi Osawa explains that, for Kawaguchi, relationships "[compose] the identity of things [...] the direct existence of a thing is mediated by relationship," This generalized interest revealed itself in Yusuke Nakahara's subtitle for the 1970 Tokyo Biennale: "Between Man and Matter." He commented: "At present it seems that certain artists are attempting to make art into that relation between man and matter, including the resultant contradictions. In some cases this appears as an emphasis on the relation itself, and in others as the experience of relationship." This was especially true of artists associated with Mono-ha, such as Jiro Takamatsu, Noboru Sekine, Suga Kishio, and Lee Ufan, who has called all of his sculptures Relatum since 1972.

For Relation - Heat, presented at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo in 1970, Kawaguchi laid plate casts on the floor and propped lead bars against gallery walls, each of which had been melted to varying degrees.

Lotus flowers and their seeds have been a recurring element in Kawaguchi's lead works since 1990. After learning that lotus seeds discovered amongst Jōmon period ruins were able to germinate, Kawaguchi imagined that the lotus seeds he encases in lead may one day, thousands of years in the future, sprout. The artist's works thus evoke, in the words of art historian Alexandra Munroe, "a sense of organic growth arrested and protected for eternity."

Collections and selected exhibitions Kawaguchi's work has been collected by a number of institutions in Japan and beyond, including the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura; National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; the National Museum of Modern Art, Osaka; the Iwaki City Art Museum, Iwaki; the Chiba City Museum of Art, Chiba City; the Nagoya City Art Museum, Nagoya; the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Hokkaido; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC.

Selected solo exhibitions

1968: DARK, Muramatsu Gallery, Tokyo, 1971: 172,800 Seconds, Galerie 16, Kyoto 1987: Series Today's Artist - Tatsuo Kawaguchi, Osaka Contemporary Art Centre, Osaka 1990: Today's Artist - V - '90 Tatsuo Kawaguchi, The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura 1997: Relation - Tatsuo Kawaguchi, Chiba City Museum of Art, Chiba 1998: Sight Breathing/Tatsuo Kawaguchi: Dialogue with the Unseen, Iwaki City Art Museum, Fukushima 1998: Kawaguchi Tatsuo 1990-1998: Sealed Time, Art Tower Mito, Ibaraki 1999: Tatsuo Kawaguchi: Relation - Kyoto, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, Kyoto 2002: Japan Contemporary Art - Kawaguchi Tatsuo, Busan Museum of Art 2004: Relation - Floating of Time, Nagoya City Art Museum, Nagoya 2005: Time within Time, Aomori Contemporary Art Centre, Aomori 2007: Tatsuo Kawaguchi: the Invisible and the Visible, Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art/Nagoya City Art Museum 2008: DARK BOX 2008, Nagoya City Art Museum, Nagoya 2008: Voyage of Time, Nizayama Forest Art Museum, Toyama 2008: Positions Towards Infinity: Works of Tatsuo Kawaguchi in 1970s, Utsunomiya Museum of Art, Tochigi 2009: Kawaguchi Tatsuo: Language Time, Life [1 & 2], The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo 2010: Kawaguchi Tatsuo: The Spiral Time, Kake Museum of Art, Okayama 2012: Let There Be Light! Tatsuo Kawaguchi: World After 3/11, Iwaki City Art Museum, Fukushima

Selected group exhibitions

1970: Tokyo Biennale '70: Between Man and Matter, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Gallery, Tokyo 1973: 12th Biennale de São Paulo, São Paulo 1973: 8th Biennale de Paris, Musée d'art moderne, Paris 1986: Japon des Avant Gardes, Musée national d'art Moderne - Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 1989: Magiciens de la Terre, Musée national d'art Moderne - Centre Georges Pompidou, La Grande Halle de la Villette, Paris 1992: The Urban Environment and Art in Japan: My Home Sweet Home in Ruins, Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo 1994: Memento Mori: Visions of Death c. 1500 - 1994, Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, Tochigi 1994: Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky, Guggenheim Museum, New York 2000, 2003, 2012 : Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, Niigata 2002: Power of Art, Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Hyogo 2004: Group "i", Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Hyogo 2009: Waiting for Video: Works from the 1960s to Today, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo 2009: Vital Signals: Japanese and American Video Art from the 1960s and 70s, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles 2011: Morphology of Emptiness, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo 2012: Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles