Yūgen Project

Series of paintings based on ancient Japanese/Chinese characters.

Gaby Oshiro

January 12, 2021

Yūgen: an ancient word that originally comes from Chinese poetry, but it has been adapted to Japanese aesthetics, it describes not only poetic verse but also natural and artistic beauty. The word itself doesn’t describe beauty directly, it describes the feeling that you’re having when you see something beautiful or hear something profound.

An analogy to understand yūgen better could be: a fresh breeze in a Summer night, cherry blossoms bloomed, suddenly the wind blows through the trees and the petals start to scatter like rain, the feeling you have in that moment is yūgen.

The word is made by two kanji, yū 幽 graceful, elegant.

gen 玄 mysterious, profound, deep.

Together they describe a sense of subtle profundity, or graceful elegance. That is evoked and seen by the heart and not the eyes.

Art is implicated beyond the ordinary extent of consciousness, it surpasses the awareness, and any knowledge or experience that the individual skimming through the surface could have brought to the interaction with the oeuvre.

A painter not only represents his contemporaneity but he/she is also interrelated with the ones that came before him. This past is not inevitably a few years ago, it could be a past of millenniums ago.

Why Yūgen?

When you look at a painting, you could think it’s pleasant to look at, but there is so much more than the superficial beauty, color, texture or form. In this case there is the hidden beauty of the language, the symbols I used for my work are from the Oracle Bone Script period (甲骨文字 - Koukotsu Moji), 1000 BC-1200 BC.

Language and communication began with signs and symbols that are the foundation of written communication seen in present day kanji/hanzi characters and this is a remarkable fact, although it might be difficult to recognize their origins because the characters have been through many changes.

Many painters from the American Abstract Expressionism and the European Art Informel succeeded in creating their own pictorial language. Franz Kline, Giuseppe Capogrossi and Robert Motherwell drew inspiration from shodō and Capogrossi’s comblike matrice was an actual oracle bone pictograph that means “big”.

Unlike these group of artists, I didn’t need to start developing a new language from scratch because I wanted to be connected to my ancestors’ cultural heritage. I did encounter the challenge of re-elaborating the pictograms, ideograms and logograms. I took the etymology of kanji/hanzi/hanja (the names of the characters in Japanese/Chinese/Korean) as my departure point to reinterpret this ancient language and exploring my own version of those symbols fusing them with my contemporaneity. The elements of pictorial semiotic in these family of paintings have been inspired from the traditional Japanese collection of colors called dentoushoku (伝統色-でんとうしょく).

Paintings Palette.

“Colors can have a range that allows external associations without imposing narrative”. Robert Motherwell

The Chronicles of Japan or Nihon Shoki (日本書紀) accounts for events until the 8th century, it was a mix of fact and mythology, and it mentions the four oldest color terms in the Japanese language: aka 赤-あか or red, kuro 黒-くろ or black, shiro 白-しろ or white, and ao 青-あお or blue.

Basic chromatic register, intertwined shapes, dynamic, pulsating, vital rhythm, painting becomes space, the sign becomes a structure unconsciously tracing the ideograms of origin.

With contrasting colors, that vibrate in front of the eye, giving off light.

The palette is simplified; black, ocher, red, white, blue a mixture of black and white, then gray, coincidentally matched Capogrossi’s and Motherwell’s paintings.

The non-figurative forms breathe, but evoke psychological, familiar perceptions.

Akani or vermilion used to paint the "torii" which symbolize the boundary between the earthly and the sacred. Its function was to protect against evil, natural disasters, dangers, bad luck and evil spirits. The red amplified the powers of the 'kami' or deities.

The red, loved by the samurai, symbolized power, strength during battles and also fire.

Red is an ancient color used in many ceremonies and festivals, synonymous with prosperity and peace.

White, on the other hand, was always used by samurai during seppuku. White in Japanese culture had always been synonymous with purity, close to the spiritual, sacred world. Only after the opening of Japan during the Meiji period (1868-1912) under the influence of the West did white begin to be used in everyday life.

Black is traditionally a masculine color. Different hues of black were used in the samurai armor. And it is still used today during men festivals and in the groom's clothing. Shinto priests use a black hat as a symbol of their enlightenment.

The gold color symbolizes the sun, and the power and mercy of the gods.

Signs and symbols derived from the turtle plastrons and animal bones marks are the foundations of written communication as we know it today and are part of the beginnings of semiotic theory.

Paintings like haiku bring a meditational element. I see the Yūgen series as a visual haiku.

In Japanese culture beauty lies in the things left unsaid, people use the opportunity to use their imagination.

Each painting has been paired with haiku written by artist and poet Hide Oshiro, my great-uncle. Poetry and art go hand in hand, they are expressions of Yūgen. Both art forms are felt deeply and subtly, the word Yūgen was used for the first time in Basho’s (1644-1694) haiku.

To evoke and to use the imagination, touching the collective unconscious is the essence of Yūgen, to pause and ponder in front of the painting after the eyes followed the trajectory of rhythmic colors and forms is to perceive a little bit of satori or enlightenment.

The painting is a language that the public has to decipher, and they put part of themselves when they “read”it. It’s an experience of mystery that cannot be put in words hence an ideal philosophical term for an aesthetic experience but also an ideal aesthetic term for a philosophical experience. As the haiku has its rhythm and structure, the painting could have its kireji (切れ字) or pause, made to meditate about the experience of becoming part of the interlocution.

As Emilio Vedova once said: “The artists deliver their idea of reality.” And this is sums up my aspiration for the Yūgen Project.

Yūgen (More personal version)

Growing up in Buenos Aires, with different languages and traditions, every time that I stepped into my grandparents households, I was transported into the world they knew as children, full of their stories growing up and family histories.

In order to understand more about them, before I was able to travel and see it all with my own eyes, I had books, Japanese school, Italian school, undokai, bazaars, attended Japanese associations with their classes of shodō, ikebana, ukiyo-e, dance, sushi, and Italian consulate activities, my grandfather sitting at the kitchen table reading Dante Alighieri or listening to opera or pop music from the 1960’s.

I got to live in the land of my maternal grandfather, the Veneto region for many years. But even if I was able to visit Okinawa, (the land where both of my Japanese grandparents were born) I wasn’t not able to break completely the seal of mystery that surrounds Japan.

I have been studying several Japanese art techniques and language. Memories of my childhood folding origami with my grandmother during her breaks while tending her dry cleaner store come to my mind. With golden papers that my grandfather would collect from his cigarette packs I would fold them diagonally and then tear away the smaller rectangle at the base of the triangle to make the paper square, which is the base for any traditional origami.

With the hot ironing machines on, the boiler lit right next to my ojiisan’s chair (my grandfather) would unfold the La Plata Hochi and I would try reading his Japanese newspaper, and later on he would show me all the different steps to write the kanji that caught my attention because of their aesthetics or because I liked their meanings.

I always had a curiosity for where every day words originated, my Italian grandfather Giovanni who spoke many languages used a more complex vocabulary than the people around, he would use words that I didn’t understand so I would ask: ”Abuelo, what does that mean?” And he reply would always be: “Agarrá el mata-burros”, get the “donkey-killer” (burro means ignorant in colloquial Castilian). I would get any of the two volume dictionary from the shelves, and look for the definition of the word and its etymology.

A few years ago when I had to give away my grandmother’s things in Buenos Aires, I found notebooks, pads and loose papers with lists on them of words in Japanese and Spanish. All neatly written in kanji. I would spend hours trying to look for the number of strokes and then look the characters up in one of the old kanji books that my aunt Yoko gave me when I was in elementary school.

It stuck with me through the years, even though, nowadays looking up a word is a click of the mouse. This is the reason why I decided to look for the etymology of kanji (Japanese characters) or Hanzi (Chinese characters).

We can’t talk about Japanese kanji history without looking at the Hanzi, there are characters created in Japan called kokuji, but the majority have their roots in China.

To my surprise it goes back over three-five thousand years. Each character went through an evolution from pictograms, morphemes, referents and ideograms.

On the Yūgen series I am interested in painting the regression of certain characters linked to my family history, zen philosophy characters, interesting words that like my grandmother I make lists of.

Chinese and Japanese people know how to read kanji and hanzi, but they don’t normally know the etymology of the characters found in tortoise shells, animal bones, Bronze period vessels, or seal scripts since the modern characters have been through many forms.

One of the remarkable things that I found in this research was that many of these symbols are closer than we though. A more thorough investigation into early trans-Pacific interaction should bring to light that the Chinese had some contact with Native people. In the manuscript written by John Ruskamp, Jr has identified over 82 petroglyphs matching unique ancient Chinese scripts not only at multiple sites in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but also nearby in Arizona, as well as in Utah, Nevada, California, Oklahoma, and Ontario. (See picture below)

I decided to use my acquired knowledge to depict the history of these ancient kanji linking them to the American Abstract Expressionism period with artists like Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline and the Astrattismo Italiano, painters like Giuseppe Capogrossi. His work was between informal art and sign-based painting.

In an old documentary from the 1960’s Capogrossi mentioned that his work was inspired by Chinese writing. Studying the Oracle bone script I was able to find the meaning of Capogrossi’s comblike matrice. Which made perfect sense to me, unknowingly I was able to pick up one of the reasons that I was attracted to his work. My purpose is to grab the baton and keep going forward with the research from painters like Capogrossi and Accardi and find my own path