Emily Kame Kngwarreye
National Art Center, Tokyo, Japan
Big Yam (1996), 122.4x200.4cm, 122.5x200.6cm, 122.5x200.3cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. ©Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Licensed Viscopy 07
What’s the easiest way for an artist to get noticed in Japan? Hold an exhibition in New York. Or so the saying went for a long time. It was true for both Japanese and foreign artists, including those who were much further from the American east coast than to Tokyo.
A stunningly beautiful and astoundingly ambitious retrospective for the Australian Aboriginal artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye, currently on show at the National Art Center, Tokyo (touring from the National Art Museum, Osaka) is proving that the old adage is well and truly dead and suggesting that perhaps for the first time Japanese curators are learning to cut their own paths through the global cultural landscape.
That is not to say that Emily (who is generally known by her first name) is a nobody. Having embarked on a frenzied painting career during just the last eight of her 86 years on earth (she died in 1996), churning out hundreds of paintings that shifted gradually from dots to abstract line-patterns to broad swaths of colour, she is revered enough in her native country to command more than a million dollars per painting at auction. Still, until this year she had had only one retrospective outside of Australia – at the church-cum-gallery De Oude Kerk in Amsterdam – and one major touring show in Australia at the end of the 1990s.
Yet now, in a country where the stamp of approval from New York or London has always been a must, Emily is the subject of a 120-work exhibition touring two national museums. To put this in perspective, while this is not only the largest show of Emily’s work ever, it is the largest exhibition by any Australian artist outside of Australia ever. It’s no wonder Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is on his way over – no Aussie artist’s ever got a better reception, anywhere.
How did this happen? Well, three years ago an art critic and published poet named Akira Tatehata was appointed head of the National Museum of Art, Osaka. In the late ‘90s he had seen the initial Emily retrospective in Australia. ‘It made me cry,’ he told me. Tatehata tried for years to bring Emily’s works to Japan, but it wasn’t until he landed the Osaka job (and had a fateful discussion with a closet Australophile at the Yomiuri Shimbun, the newspaper company that is now co-hosting the show) that it became a possibility. ‘It was a miracle,’ he said.
The curator calls Emily an ‘impossible modernist.’ She lived for most of her life in the remote Utopia region that lies to the north of Alice Springs, having very little contact with western society, let alone art theories. For example, when she drew a maze of interweaving yellow and ochre lines, Emily meant it as a picture of yam roots dedicated to her ancestors (her middle name, Kame, means ‘yam’). Curators like Tatehata saw it differently, noting that it displays, ‘all the techniques honed by the Abstract Expressionists.’
The same goes for most of the other works. Yam Awelyee (1995), another spaghetti bowl of crisscrossing lines in yellow, red and white, has been given a black background – such a simple device, yet sufficient to charge the foreground, sending the lines streaking and arcing with spasms of life. Alhalkere (My Country) (1991), a dot painting in reds and browns, has a depth that seems to go on forever, like a mountain range viewed from a helicopter. One of Emily’s later dot paintings, Untitled (1991), is sure to win fans in Japan. With its dots flattened out into quasi-Impressionist brush-shaped splats in light pink, it forms an uncanny and gorgeous resemblance to this county’s famed cherry blossoms.
Emily’s paintings are large in size – up to 8 metres in height or width (the artist painted on the ground, so the works’ orientations are determined by the curator) – and they thrive on the National Art Center’s 8-metre-high walls. This is without doubt the most beautiful exhibition put on at this eighteen-month-old venue, designed by the late Modernist Kisho Kurokawa. Even the works at last year’s Monet show seemed fiddly here (there were none of the large water lilies). Emily’s paintings, in contrast, seem to relate to the venue like a sound does to an audio speaker: the bigger the box, the greater the amplification.
Japan now has plenty of young curators working to bring innovative art from all corners of the world to domestic audiences. What it hasn’t had until now is a director of a public museum – and you need to be a director to pull off something this bold – with the knowledge and courage to go outside of the Euro-American mainstream and find an artist with whom he connects personally. For that reason alone this is more than an extraordinarily beautiful exhibition for an extraordinarily gifted artist; it is a watershed in Japanese museum history.
Edan Corkill
Responses
Added by chrismoore111,
It is difficult reconciling Aboriginal art within an increasingly Conceptualist art world. In many respects, you can’t - it must stand apart, albeit with an aesthetic which appeals directly to modernists. A different path needs to be taken. One option is to adopt Kant’s notion of the Sublime to transcend Western artist paradigms (or prejudices). Another recognizes the works as culturally metaphoric. An ‘abstract’ Yam Dreaming bears culturally significant references: religious, historical, and geographic. In Asia, this resonates. Traditional Chinese and Japanese landscapes are metaphoric and philosophical confections. Perhaps it is no surprise then that, apart from a few collectors, Japan cottoned-on to Emily Kngwarreye before Europe and America. Finally, her painting is both beautiful and intriguing. And that should be enough in itself, to look at it for the sake simply of what it is in terms of the artist herself, and I do not mean in terms of her biography but how she developed her practice. Her diffusing dot-paintings, her endless Yam Dreamings, her late simple abstracts. Stand way back from them and gaze not upon them but into them. Think of Rothko, Pollock and then also Yayoi Kusama, but don’t forget to also look at them as just pure Emily Kngwarreye.
Chris Moore
