Hirokazu Kosaka: One Way and Another
At first glance the sheets of paper suspended in single file across Montalvo’s Project Space are identical. Each presents a dark rectangle on a white ground. Looked at more closely they reveal variations. On some the ink is visible on the unprinted side. Slight crumpling of the paper occurred in transit. The eye alternates between the calm of orderly repetition and the intrigue of unexpected departures. Kalpa, the title of Hirokazu Kosaka’s installation, means time, and we view that in the same fashion—an over and over again pattern of days crossed, meteor-like, by the singular present moment.
The materials used in Kalpa are common but here each has a particular lineage. The paper with its pearly sheen is handmade from plant fibers according to Japanese tradition. Black ink (sumi) made from soot was used in Japan’s earliest printed pictures, and Wakayama prefecture, Kosaka’s birthplace, was an important medieval center of its production. Both materials are essential to calligraphy, which Kosaka, an ordained Buddhist priest, practices in its meditative form (Hitsuzendo). The poppy seeds adhering to the paper’s surface refer to a Sanskrit parable comparing the progress of time to the filling of a miles-high cube with the tiny seeds, added at the rate of one per century. Kosaka, who has been living and working in Los Angeles since the mid 1970s, also holds a BFA in painting from its Chouinard Art Institute, so it’s possible that the seeds’ changeable blue gray color inspired him as well.
Holding on to the tension between the particular instance and the general pattern and keeping them both in balance is a theme that frequently emerges in Buddhist writings. In the West, we might describe it in perceptual terms as observing the relation of figure and ground. It’s work we allocate to artists rather than priests. In Eastern thought those two disciplines blend together. One feature of Kosaka’s installations and collaborations is that they habitually direct our attention away from art as a discrete object and toward the processes involved in its making.
Of course some of those processes are within the artist himself. Members of Kosaka’s family have been residing in the United States for four generations. The idea of the places we keep in mind while we live in others is behind his on-going project, Ruin Map, in which older Asian immigrants on both the East and West coasts draw maps of their childhood home. Carved into woodblocks—the process suggests the action of memory on the brain, Kosaka says—the maps are then hand printed. These are the sheets that hang from the ceiling. When they were first hung, the poppy seeds created an evenly textured, fabric-like surface. It looked something like tweed. Over time, as the seeds drop, the fabric wears.
Kosaka’s June performance at the Carriage House draws on another traditional discipline, Japanese archery. Although a martial art, it has—like calligraphy—a meditative form. Just as the brush becomes an extension of the artist’s body and emptied mind, in Kyudo, or the way of the bow, the end result—hitting the straw target—is considered inseparable from the means of attaining it. Arrow, bow, target, the shooter’s breath, mind, and heartbeat, all that’s aimed and aimed at, work together or the shot misses its ultimate mark. The practice, Kosaka has said, “is about trying to achieve oneness with self.”
In his performance, titled “On the Retina,” the themes explored in Kalpa take dramatic form. Out of the archer’s slow ceremonial movements comes the meteor-like arrow streaking across the audiences’ vision. But this is only a starting point. Kosaka’s collaborators accompany the flight from its centuries-old formal beginnings to its present location. Oguri is a Japanese born Butoh dancer now based in Los Angeles. Emerging from Japan’s avant-garde movement at the end of the 1950s, Butoh—originated by Tatsumi Hijikata, Oguri’s teacher—encourages dancers to explore personal and socially challenging ideas and position themselves to be transformed by them. On the Retina’s other partner, Tetsuya Nakamura, was drawn by the American music he heard on Armed Forces radio while he was growing up in Tokyo to study blues harmonica. Since moving to this country he has toured and recorded with rock, rap and acoustic musicians. The onstage collaborations—body and mind, music and dance, old and new—include us, too. Like the archer’s target, our receptive awareness is an inseparable part of whole performance.
