Yasue Kodama

Yasue Kodama (児玉靖枝) is a Japanese artist born in Hyogo in 1961. She graduated from the Kyoto City University of Arts with a B.A. in Oil Painting in 1984 and an M.A. in painting in 1986. Kodama's early works consist primary of still life works but she shifted to more abstract works in the 1990s but then turns back towards the representational in the 2000s. She has received various awards throughout her career, such as the 34th Kyoto Fine Arts and Culture Award in 2021, and has participated numerous group exhibition such as VOCA: Vision of Contemporary Art exhibitions and Monet's Legacy at the Yokohama Museum of Art in 2018. Her works are included in various public collections across Japan. She has also taught painting at her alma mater, the Kyoto City University of Arts.

Artistic development

Early works In an interview for Art Okuru, Kodama explains that when she first started making artwork in the 1980s, she felt caught between the two pervading artistic frameworks of conceptual art and expressionistic works that seemed to “explode from within.” Due to this seemingly polarized environment she decided to simply paint what was in front of her and focused on still life oil paintings.

As a student, she would spend copious amounts of time, three to four months, painting detailed stones and other motifs. It was through this process and her exposure to Georgio Morandi at her professor's suggestion that she became interested in the idea of pictorial space which nudged the trajectory of her work away from realism.

In her process of artistic development, Kodama was heavily influenced by the way that Mark Rothko uses delicate color arrangements to express light in limited pictorial space; the scale and the ease with which Robert Motherwell produces his layered textured works. These were the influenced behind her shift to abstraction which coalesced in her Natura Morta series.

Her various nature motifs have undergone various evolutions but speaking about her works depicting cherry blossom Kodama says that she paints, “not to describe the motif, but to capture the atmosphere.” Yuka Egami, curator at the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, succinctly describes Kodama's arch in her essay introducing the Theatre of Our Lives group exhibition in 2002, “For a time, Kodama Yasue painted highly abstract pictures with brilliant strokes of color across whiteish field, but in recent years, she has again turned to more concrete motifs. Not only are the images concrete, they are familiar objects like flowers, trees and goldfish – things one might normally expect to see in a painting. Though the images are common in our daily lives, they are painted in an airy way over a deep expansive background.”

Critical reception

Stylistic shifts In an essay for the exhibition catalogue at Art Site in 1994, Art Critic Yoshinobu Shimasaki establishes that the gradual process of Kodama's shift away from the representational towards more abstract works of forms and colors began in 1988 “the still objects in her paintings began to show a tendency to gradually melt or disappear into the hazy space surrounding them.”

Commenting on Kodama's early forays into abstraction, Shimasaki describes her early abstract monochromatic colored surfaces or forms as “masses” that pursue her “interest in the painting space that originates from still life without borrowing the forms of objects from the world outside the painting.” He says that the lines of Kodama's brushstrokes and the “saturation and brightness” of the carefully selected hues in her earlier works portended her eventual transition towards the abstract.

East West Dichotomy Analysis

Quintet exhibition Regarding the influence of Kodama's western and eastern influences, Masaru Igarashi, Senior Chief Curator for the Sompo Museum's group exhibition titled Quintet in 2014, succinctly traces the legacy of Western landscape painting. Igarashi traces the arc from J.M.W. Turner to Claude Monet, and the cultural transmission of non-figurative landscapes to Japan during the Meiji Period, a culture in which “Landscape is a familiar subject for the Japanese.” This transmission resulted in “a fading of the presence of art forms such as Chinese ink paintings that influenced the development of Japanese art.”

After establishing the premise of the entangled modern Japanese aesthetic between East and West, Igarashi references the 1978 exhibition Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which established the precedent for dividing art into two board categories as “’windows’ that faithfully represent the external world and ‘mirrors’ that reflect what the photographer has sense or perceived in a more Romantic form of expression.” Igarashi extends this broad categorization to the realm of painting and describes Kodama and the other four artists in the exhibition as “‘mirror’ type artists who perceive scenes or landscapes through the filter of their own sensibilities and perceptions and, with concern for elements such as the season, time, or weather, represent them in views wrapped gently in brilliant moments created ... with the artists perceptions, memories or images intertwined.”

Deep Rhyme exhibition In an essay for Kodama's exhibition in 2018, art critic Toshiaki Minemura relates to Kodama's oscillation between the representational and the abstract to two concepts: the French concept of obliteration, or a cancelation made over a postal stamp to indicate that it has been used; and the Japanese concept of egaki-keshi or mise-kechi, which Minemura defines as a proofreading method that “rather than blacking out erroneous parts, mise-kechi keeps them visible while crossing them out with one or two lines” and the direction translation is “to draw and erase.” Minemura explains that this “act of half erasing and half keeping a visibility” is best achieved with a paint brush: “A wise brushwork can, without obliterating the whole thing, half erase, leave unpainted areas, or let the preceding layers beneath be seen through the brushstroke” which all depend upon “whether the artist can comprehend the significance of ‘half’ that regulates the subtle conversion of visibility and invisibility, presence and absence.” Minemura argues that Kodama’s explorations between the representational and the abstract and natural motifs can be understood within the context of these concepts.

The Deep Rhyme exhibition, which revisited Kodama's early works, was held at MEM Gallery in Tokyo. A monograph of the same title was published by the gallery with photographs from Kodama's major exhibitions, tracing the artistic development of the artist.

Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art

The Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama

Selected group exhibitions Light & Shadow: The Sense of Ephemerality, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, 1994

The Vision of Contemporary Art 1994, The Ueno Royal Museum, 1994

Allegory of Seeing, 1995: Painting and Sculpture in Contemporary Japan, Sezon Museum of Art Tokyo, 1995

The Vision of Contemporary Art 1996, The Ueno Royal Museum, 1996

The Vision of Contemporary Art 1997, The Ueno Royal Museum, 1997

The Vision of Contemporary Art 1998, The Ueno Royal Museum, 1998

Theatre of our lives, Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, 2002

Dialogues, Painters’ Views on the Museum Collection: Iba Yasuke, Kodama Yasue, Sagaawa Koji, Watanabe Nobuaki, The Museum of Modern Art, Shiga, 2007

LINK - Flexible Deviation, Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, 2009

Primary Field II, The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama, 2010

New Incubation 4 Yurameki Tokeyuku: Yasue Kodama & Tetsuji Nakanishi, Kyoto Art Center, 2012

Quintet: Five-Star Artists, Teiji Togo Memorial Sompo Japan Museum of Art, 2014

Monet – 100 Years Since Then, Nagoya City Art Museum/Yokohama Museum of Art, 2018

Observation: Artists Confronting the Wonder of Looking Intently, Gunma Museum of Art, Tatebayashi, 2019

Sorezore no Nagame: Miwa Kawai, Yasue Kodama, Hisako Masuda, Satoko Watanabe, the Tokushima Modern Art Museum, 2020