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Triple X: Extended, Exploded, Extracted - Naoto Nakagawa, 1965-1975
 Naoto Nakagawa, Breaking Event performance, 1971. Silver gelatin print. Photo by Tom Haar. White Box is pleased to present
Triple X: Extended, Exploded, Extracted, an exhibition that traces the early work of painter Naoto Nakagawa through the formative years of his career, 1965 to 1975. Eric Shiner, guest curator of this mini-retrospective, explains the exhibition concept in the accompanying catalogue as follows: Three key words of Triple X - "Extended," "Exploded," and "Extracted" - summarize the evolution of his early painting. Taken from the title of his first solo exhibition, held at the vanguard Judson Gallery, "Extended" alludes to the artist's surrealist experiments in painted pastiche with everyday objects and a subsequent, more studied approach to the formal arrangement of objects in space, albeit with a strong attention to visual conceit. "Exploded" refers to the "explosive force" felt in his large-scale works throughout 1970–72. Also characterized as the "Angry Objects" by art critic John Perreault, these "Exploded" canvases are populated by huge household objects rendered in bright hues, which seem to be engaged in an epic struggle—violence, sexual tension, and anger seem to animate them throughout. Finally, "Extracted," corresponding to the Hyperreal Still Lifes in Perreault's terminology, indicates a new direction in Nakagawa's work, in which a calmer temperament, meticulous observation, and formal perfection help him "extract" familiar objects from the mundane world, as powerfully as his "Extended" and "Exploded" works. With all of the works in Triple X, the iconography of Nakagawa's imagery provides a window onto the painter's inner thoughts and struggles. They typify his own journeys, relationships, and artistic output, representing the pivotal progress of a young painter's search for a fully unique style. The exhibition includes examples of all of these periods, in addition to several drawings and works on paper, some from the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Many of Nakagawa's large-scale paintings will be displayed for the first time, giving the viewer a rare chance to see these pivotal works that helped to shape the artist's later output. From "Curator's Note" Naoto Nakagawa (born in Osaka, Japan, 1944) studied fine art at Osaka University of Arts. In 1962, inspired by an exhibition in Osaka of works by American Abstract Expressionists, he emigrated via freighter to New York. There he studied at the Brooklyn Museum of Art School, and his work was first exhibited at Judson Gallery in Greenwich Village, Lending Gallery of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Moore College of Art in 1968. Nakagawa's recent solo exhibitions have been at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City, Davidson College in North Carolina, the Nielsen Gallery in Boston, Victoria Munroe Fine Art in New York City, Tamada Projects Co. in Tokyo, Japan, and Gallery Holly Snapp in Venice, Italy. Nakagawa's work is included in many public and private collections, among them
The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Worcester Art Museum; Lester Avnet Foundation; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; The National Museums of Modern Art, Kyoto; The National Museum of Art, Osaka; Fukuoka Art Museum; Osaka City Museum of Modern Art (preparatory
office); Fukuyama Museum of Art; Meguro Museumof Art, Tokyo; Oita Art Museum; and Takamatsu City Museum of Art. In 1976 Naoto Nakagawa was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant. He has taught at Columbia University, Parsons School of Design, and Windham College. He has been a guest lecturer and panelist at various universities; Japan Society, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and on Manhattan Cable Television, National Public Radio, and Fuji Television,
Japan. Press
Show: Triple X: Extended, Exploded, Extracted – Naoto Nakagawa 1965-1975 Tradition, community, and their preservation are sticky subjects for artists in the 21st century. The communication, trade, and information networks that encourage interaction among once isolated cultures have engendered a pervasive sense of ambivalence. Hopes for fruitful cultural cross-pollination have devolved into anxiety over the hybridization and, worse, disintegration, of traditional ways of making art. Is it possible to appreciate another culture without exoticizing it, or to appropriate its forms without simplistically mimicking them?
Forty five years ago, Naoto Nakagawa hopped a freighter to New York City from Japan. Globalization was the last thing on his mind. He admits to being swept up by the New York School lore that drifted across the Pacific. His grandfather was one of the most revered traditional landscape painters in Japan, yet he was fascinated by Rothko and de Kooning. To further complicate his roots, Nakagawa studied as a teenager with Kikonami Joji, one of leaders of the Gutai group, an avant-garde movement that broadened the terms of action painting to emphasize the entire body as an artistic instrument. Despite being an exceptional case, Nakagawa's journeys across the Pacific Ocean and the New York art world is proof that two cultures can collide at full speed without totaling their original identities.
Triple X: Extended, Exploded, Extracted – Naoto Nakagawa, 1965-1975,at White Box provides a glimpse into Nakagawa's early developments upon arriving in the United States in 1962. A second, unrelated show calledScream of Nature at Ethan Cohen Fine Arts showcases Nakagawa's recent work, revealing an artist shaped by four decades of reconciliation between West and East, the man-made and the natural world.
The work at White Box feels very American, even without the benefit of knowing Nakagawa's story; however, traces of his traditional past manage to surface. Rather than directly celebrating the natural world, as his grandfather did, or the expressive power of the human body like the Gutai, he looks to the mundane vocabulary of American Pop. The tensions wrought by the utility-drawer subject matter in Nakagawa's paintings can be read as natural forces in an epic struggle against man for control. "Echo 1" (1972) depicts a hammer swinging toward a mirror, scissors strangled by straining rubber bands, and the tines of a hair comb bending sideways, ready to snap like trees in a hurricane. The whole scene is a single catalyst away from exploding into disorder.
Similarly, "Echo 2" evokes nature's raw power through visual metaphors couched in sleekly painted tools and household utensils. They float in shallow, synthetic atmospheres of flat acrylic paint, and their synthetic, straight-from-the-tube primaries vibrate dizzyingly across the walls of the gallery. The painting is loud, intense, and sophisticated, and, although it leaves room for interpretation, it doesn't allow much time for it.
Nakagawa's imagery evokes associations with James Rosenquist and Jim Dine among other Pop practitioners; however, while these American forebears were more apt to treat such subject matter clinically, Nakagawa's prefers to humanize and sexualize them. This tendency anticipates his move away from the hardware store, so to speak, a transition that is signaled by "Still Life with Earth" (1975), in which the scissors, comb, and hammer that were so active in earlier work are tamed and neutered into less than suitable vehicles to carry the power of the natural world.
The work at Ethan Cohen Fine Arts demonstrates Nakagawa's eventual reliance on nature as a subject. The work is quieter, but still powerful on its own terms. It retains vestiges of the hyper-rich, keyed-up palette of the earlier, Pop-influenced work, as well as its penchant for drama, but he nurses the foreplay between the viewer and the content, building gently and gradually to a climax. An enormous, wall-size painting, "Red Landscape," (2006) depicts a thatchy close-up of a forest. It's a natural setting, but its hyper-resolute detail and intense color is far from calming. "Ephemera" (2007), another large, tightly cropped weedy vista, gives the viewer only a little more room to breathe, thanks to a patch of deep, unnatural cobalt blue sky in the upper left.
Unlike the individually gripping works at White Box, the paintings at Ethan Cohen seem to succeed by committee. The show is densely hung, and the paintings themselves are busy to the point of suffocation. Their rich, saturated colors contradict the reality of the environments they describe, and build to an unsettling and humbling experience. Intensity runs like a high voltage current throughout all of Nakagawa's work; the orgiastic immediacy of his early paintings is matched by the cumulative power of his landscapes. Scream of Nature will leave the viewer wondering what hit them long after they leave.
These two exhibitions are only portals on either side of a decades-long career, and there is a lot in between. Since landing in the United States in 1962 under the spell of New York's artistic ferment, Nakagawa's work has undergone an organic process of borrowing, divesting, and capitalizing on both his traditional and adopted cultures. The disparate influences weighing on his art, like the saturated colors of his palette, sit in conspicuous contrast without neutralizing each other.
Press
Show: Triple X: Extended, Exploded, Extracted – Naoto Nakagawa 1965-1975 Two New York shows, one of early paintings and one of recent ones, comprise a partial retrospective one of the most important and provocative Japanese-American painters of the past half century. Naoto Nakagawa offers the viewer much, but his violent, disturbing, and hallucinatory vision demands no less of us.
The artist as interrogator
The art of the Japanese masters has proved immensely influential and fructifying for Western art over the past century and a half, but the Japanese-American painter Naoto Nakagawa, while remaining fully committed to his birth tradition, has incorporated his adopted culture in a subtle, challenging and often surprising fusion of East and West. The results are currently on display at two New York galleries, Chelsea's White Box and, in Tribeca, at Ethan Cohen Fine Arts.
The work at the White Box covers Nakagawa's early years in New York, from 1965 to 1975. On the surface, these mostly large, hard-edge canvases — visually aggressive, sexually charged and surreally violent— seem not only to have assimilated the idiom of James Rosenquist and other reigning Pop Mannerists, but to push at emotional and erotic frontiers only hinted at by them. They're at once elegant and disturbing, with their broken hammers, shattered mirrors, and fettered scissors, displaying an astonishing technical command in the service of a provocative, almost obsessive symbology. Ear (1970) brings the influence of Dali to the surface, but the reference is no mere quotation, and the eidos is far more direct: If these are dream-images, they are more like a waking nightmare than anything in the Spanish master.
A penis from a scissors blade All this seems hardly Japanese, until one reflects more closely on the subject matter of these works. Four Corners, Timetable and Anatomy of a Timepiece, all from 1971, feature enlarged mirrors and pocket watches being pierced, shattered and kindled by a variety of objects that lie within or athwart the picture plane: sharpened pencils and protractors; plunging black umbrellas; a wayward bar stool; a huge, red-toothed comb; flaming matches.
Suddenly, memory coalesces the core image: the burnt timepiece, its hands forever frozen, that has come to symbolize the destruction of Hiroshima by the world's first atomic bomb. With that, the sense of menace and rage— shocking, exhilarating, and fiercely controlled— that pervades the show comes into focus: the blunted scissors; the tied paintbrush (Beginning of a Still Life); the penis that grows out of a scissors blade and the parrot beak that curves up from below to meet it (Icon). It's not a political statement but, rather, an ontological one; for this, says Nakagawa, is the imperiled world we all live in now, victors and victims alike.
Like nothing in nature In contrast, the recent paintings (2002-2007) at Ethan Cohen Gallery offer densely compacted "landscapes" that, while owing some provenance to Max Ernst, reflect the sinister turn our increasingly poisoned planet has taken, our alienated relation to it, and the fate we indissolubly share with it. With the exception ofEphemera (2007), none of these works offers any suggestion of clear space, and the patch of darkly uniform blue in the upper corner of Ephemera itself is no sky, but a breathless void. The superficially autumnal tints of the leaves that present themselves ominously to the viewer are glittery and false, like nothing in nature, and they proliferate without actually depending from the thin, reddish stalks whose paths intersect them.
The stalks themselves, in passages such as those in Forest of Eden andThanatopsis, seem more like engorged, arterial threads bleeding through fantastic organs. Has nature itself, no longer "outer" to us, become indistinguishable from the self? The question is posed but, as in the Pop/Surreal masterworks of Nakagawa's early period, not answered. What is clear, however, is that Nakagawa's real interrogation is aimed at the viewer, and that what he demands of us is a fierce and sustained lucidity of our own, the ability to stake our ground before an oeuvre that, over more than four decades, has neither asked quarter nor given it.
Press:
Show:Triple X: Extended, Exploded, Extracted – Naoto Nakagawa 1965-1975 Naoto Nakagawa's personal journey through the New York art world over the past four decades is nearly as colorful as the palette for his hyper-dynamic, symbolic groupings of everyday objects currently hanging at White Box at 525 W. 26th Street. The show, entitled "Triple X: Extended, Exploded, Extracted – Naoto Nakagawa, 1965-1975," runs concurrently, but not in association with "Scream of Nature" at Ethan Cohen Fine Arts in Tribeca. The shows are bookends for Nakagawa's story of development, from the electric days of the New York avant-garde upon on his arrival from Japan and the ensuing maturation that brought him continually closer to the culture he left behind. I caught up with Mr. Nakagawa at White Box and learned in the process of interviewing him that the dualities reflected in his art – introspection and expression, modernism and tradition, loud and quiet – are all equally reflected in the artist. Your grandfather Kagaku Murakami was an esteemed ink painter in Japan. What, if any, influence did you take from his work? When someone is as great as Kagaku Murakami, it's not so much a question of what I personally absorbed, [as] he is a universal person. I was fortunate to receive inspiration and a deep understanding about life from his work and writing. You were also born in Japan. What was it like there growing up? It was a very interesting period because the world and Japan specifically were different places when I grew up in the ‘40s and ‘50s. I see a lot in common between the Japan I grew up in and China now. China has been very oppressed by Communist rule, but art has paved the way for progress. The ‘50s in Japan were known as the golden era of film – all their great films were made during that time: Kurosawa's "The Seven Samurai" and "Rashomon," Yasujiro Ozu's "Tokyo Story," Kenji Mizoguchi, etc. And in art, there was the Gutai Group. They were my neighbors – Jiro Yoshihara, Sadamasa Montonaga. I knew them as I grew up, but I was just too god damned young to participate. The Gutai influenced – or were influenced by, depending on who you ask – ideas from the West, namely action painting. They were very rhapsodic about their affinity for Jackson Pollock. Were you also informed and interested in art beyond Japan? Sure, I knew of Pollock and Rauschenberg. The Gutai were mainly interested in the position of this kind of expressionism as it related to performance. My appreciation for the Gutai was as the very first organized group to take performance art outside – to take the "happening" outdoors. Atsuko Tanaka, who just had a show last year at Paula Cooper, was one of the pioneers. The most famous piece she did was the one on the beach, in which she was covered with light bulbs. When she did it everyone was terrified that she was going to electrocute herself. Was your work specifically influenced by the Gutai's work? Yes, definitely. The Gutai gave me the idea to use my body as part of the expression of the work. At the same time, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were in an exhibition in Japan in 1959. So you knew what was happening in America and decided that you were going to jump a freighter and go see it for yourself? Yeah, Japan was just too small for me. I knew I wanted to leave when I was 16, but it took me two years to get out. Both sides were suspicious of people trying to leave, so it took planning. You couldn't come and go freely at that time? No. And on top of the restriction in trying to leave, the Japanese currency was worthless, so it was even more of an obstacle. I was actually planning on going to Paris initially, but after seeing de Kooning's women, and especially Jasper Johns, I had to risk it. Something really struck me especially with these artists: I found that they connected images and marks with something sexual. Johns' numbers weren't clinical, they were luscious. Rauschenberg's quilt looked like it had just been slept in. Did you approach any of these artists once you came to the U.S.? After arriving in New York City, the first artist I went to meet was Willem de Kooning. Later I met Hans Hoffman, too. I just showed up and knocked on their doors. But at that time I couldn't speak much English at all. So, you're in New York, an entirely unfamiliar culture, at a time when the universal language of art is in a transitional period between the old Abstract Expressionist guard and the new image-based art. How did you manage to squeeze yourself into the fray? I was very lucky. I met two people on that boat: One was a famous photojournalist named Eugene W. Smith, who had lived in Japan with his wife for two years. The other was a Fulbright student named Barbara White who had been studying the art of papermaking there. The first day I was in New York I stayed on the Bowery in a flop house. The Bowery then was nothing like today. There were hundreds of jobless drunks and drifters around. I came back to my place the second night, and the 500 dollars given to me by my father was gone. I had hidden it under my bed. I realize now that was the most obvious place for someone to look for valuables. But I was naïve. Eugene, his wife, and Barbara let me know what to expect in New York. Eugene helped me find an apartment in New York and regularly had me over. They were like a second family to me. Where did you work and how did you support yourself when you first arrived? My first job was working at a wallpaper and candlestick factory, and I found other odd jobs, too. What did your early United States work look like? What issues were you concerned with? Throughout my forty years painting, one of my obsessions has been the relationship between man and nature. I'm interested in making tools and [having] man-made objects take on an organic quality. You can see [he points to one of his early paintings on the wall] this is a pencil and it's becoming organic. The tools are an extension of man. The scissors, the pencils. That's why the pencils are pink, to symbolize flesh. I did that in 1965 when I was 21. I understand that some of the paintings that you are showing in "Triple X" were shown at OK Harris in Soho in one of your first major exhibitions. Yes, many of these large-scale paintings of tools were shown at OK Harris. Ivan Karp saw the work and asked me to join hi gallery in 1971. That reception for my first show was fantastic. Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, and John Lennon were all there. It was a scene. You can see that many of these paintings are concerned with the male and the female, man and nature. I was also very concerned at the time with windows and space – the window was a literal space inside the abstract space of the painting that symbolized a duality of something inside and something outside [which in turn] reflected my ideas about the organic synthetic. These paintings also deal with the transition that was happening at the time between the concrete and the abstract in the general art world. The show you have running at Ethan Cohen Fine Arts is of newer work that contrasts with the paintings at White Box. Although the color is high-key in both shows, the work Ethan Cohen is more directly concerned with nature. It seems quieter and more serene than these pieces. In the early seventies I was really interested in Marshall McLuhan and his ideas about how modern urban life was becoming second nature to organic nature. I was very influenced by that concept. But something happened after this work metaphysically after 1972. What did happen? I was searching for a spiritual side to my work, maybe something from Eastern philosophy. I had too much of a struggle going on between West and East. I was reaching for some kind of spiritual connection. I stumbled onto a teacher of transcendental medicine. What was coming out so forcefully in the earlier work became quieter. It's almost like I went to the other side of my own duality. And all of these are the seeds of what ended up with a greater involvement in a more personal relationship with nature. Do you feel your work has been underappreciated over the years, and, if so, how do you feel about the recent showering of attention you've received with the concurrent exhibitions in New York? I believe an artist's fate is to pursue what he wants to investigate. I am always exploring the seen and unseen phenomena of this world. So I do enjoy being recognized, but I also know what I am seeking.
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