Go Yayanagi: Biophilia

This is an imaginary dialogue. Go Yayanagii, who is over ninety years old, and Tetsuo Mizu, who is eighty, are artists we have come to know through their work. Their creations over the years have been presented around the world on paintings, sculptures, ceramics, installations, costumes and murals. The works invited to the Boxes Art Museum in Shunde, are representative in terms of subject matter, form and style, although the amount of works not too much. Especially, the worldviews and talents of the two artists seems dancing in the hall.

Both Go Yayanagii and Tetsuo Mizu’s experience and achievements are gifts of the constant exchange of Japanese culture and all over the world. What the modern world means to each individual is revealed in their creations as the wonders of civilisation, visual imagination and the recklessness of nature. The intertwining of different languages and trends of thought has constructed spiritual enclaves and homelands. Yayanagi's life journey included Japan, Brazil, Central and South America, and Europe. While Tetsuo Mizu was born in Japan and lived in Europe for a long time, and in the 1860s, when Fukuzawa Sakayoshi saw that the West was moving towards "modernity" and that the whole of Asia was still maintaining the old system, he thought that Japan should learn from the Western experience and become "modern" as well. Until the 1910s, Japan adopted plenty of European ways and means and joined the industrial world. What we see as the initial starting point for the growth of the two artists was a modern Japanese civilisation that had undergone such a change. New sciences, new perceptions, introduced society in a new direction. Their choice of travel, their attitude towards different civilisations, and their dialogue with life in various regions are able to mirror such a premise.

Consequently, they are always trekkers, each telling their associations with time and life in distinctive symbols. Go Yayanagi, who creates screen prints, oil paintings, ceramics, and costumes, and Tetsuo Mizu, who creates oil paintings, ceramics, and installations, present clear motives for the creation of the several groups of works in the museum. By designing structures and highlighting textures, they create visuals with strong effects, specifically expressing the individual as a painter's reverence for the universe and the earth, and reflections on balance and conflict. Each series is a history of the mind belonging to an individual, describing a dialogue between his own cultural attributes and the world.

Tetsuo Mizu's combination of maritime semaphore is a unique rhetorical device. Go Yayanagi's use of black and white zebra motifs is derived from an African journey and a study of black and white during his time in France. Tetsuo Mizu believes that red and black are representative of Japanese colours; and Tetsuo Mizu has named a composite word, "Pop-Uki”which is intended to point to the fusion of Pop Art and Japanese Ukiyo-e. Such multicultural gestures make their works equally caressed by a kind of light, with their own pure qualities.

Through the virtual dialogues such as these, we can observe the correlation between the growth of individual artists and the many cultural drifts, returns, and collisions, and take the opportunity to discuss the excavation of life through creativity, and to see the birth of individuality and the vision of the spirit.

Fan Lin