Yoshio Kitayama

Yoshio Kitayama (北山善夫, born 1948) is a Japanese artist born in Shiga prefecture in 1948 and based in Kyoto. He represented Japan for the 40th Venice Biennale in 1982 and has participated in the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial and the Setouchi Triennial.

He is known for his two-dimensional works which fall into a few categories: clay figures; works consisting of countless small circles are painstakingly done on Japanese style paper using pencil; or sculptures using bamboo twigs.

Early works In an essay describing Kitayama's work, art historian Lise Seisbøll explains the early trajectory of Kitayama's works. At first, he had restricted his drawings to a flat surface, often using frottage, but upon seeing the way his children created images unconfined by the two-dimensional surface, Kitayama began experimenting with incorporating bamboo twigs into his two-dimensional drawings. Seisbøll frames Kitayama's experimentation with bamboo in the post-Mono-ha period of Japanese art. She describes Mono-ha's focus on “materials that are artistically new but nationally familiar… especially wood, stone and paper.. Generally speaking the works also become architectonic, since they gain more and more affinity with the art of Japanese gardening, so rich in tradition.” His experimentation with bamboo in his two dimensional works lead to completely three-dimensional works as he began to create more structurally intricate sculptures using bamboo, paper, leather, and cloth. Although he has continued to work in drawing and in sculpture, both small and large scale, bamboo is a through line in the evolution of Kitayama's three-dimensional oeuvre. In the conclusion of her essay, Seisbøll references Japanese art critic Nakahara Yusuke's analysis of Kitayama's work:

Large-scale works In the 1990s, Kitayama's three-dimensional sculptures became much more prominent, filling gallery spaces. He participated in the 1982 Venice Biennale with Naoyoshi Hikosaka and Tadashi Kawamata, and presented a large-scale three-dimensional works composed of Japanese paper, bamboo, leather, and cloth. His works were also included in the Asian Art Biennale in Bangladesh in 1983 and 2003 and the Indian Triennale in 1991.

Kitayama's works were also included in the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale in 2000 with an installation of a large-scale sculpture of bamboo and paper which hung in the Tsuchikura Branch Elementary School. He also showed at The Carnegie International in 1982 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Japanese paper works In his essay for the 11th Asian Art Biennale, Bangladesh 2003, Mori Tsukasa writes that early in Kitayama's career, he had tried to make two-dimensional works but was frustrated with their lack of impact, which led him to his early relief-like works incorporating bamboo twigs. But as his subject matter of eternal themes such as life, death, and the universe became apparent to him, he "realized that 'the death of painting,' which he had experienced several times, was a natural consequence of the loss of a theme or subject matter. He gradually mastered ways of addressing these themes, developing motifs with powerful symbolism from drawings of the crucifixion or nirvana."

Kitayama's washi paper works consists of tens of thousands of small circles, which are painstakingly composed over hours of single-minded focus. Mori explains that Kitayama “condenses hundreds of details, which are the vestiges of his efforts, also numerous and fragmented, toward infinite time and space to create the amorphous and incomplete complex. That is, a synthetic and autonomic whole is not conceived from the beginning, and the self is crystallized in a chain of details, which are signs of his physical relationship with local time and space.” Mori says the arduous process that Kitayama endeavors coalesces in his washi works as a "self-realization as generation of a physical relationship with time and space."

His works have been included in various group exhibitions domestic and international in institutions such as the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, Kyoto; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tokyo; National Museum of Contemporary Art Seoul, Korea; Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva, Switzerland; The New Museum of Modern Art, Toyama; Gifu Prefectural Art Museum, Gifu; Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren, Germany; and others. The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Nagoya City Art Museum, Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art and others.