The Things Shuji Yamamoto No Longer Is

 

Shuji Yamamoto creates painting-like pieces using photographs, though he is neither a painter nor a photographer; he works spatially with stone, but he isn’t a sculptor either. He isn’t, yet again, a print artist, when I hear he has completed what he calls “print works.” I once wrote an introductory essay on Yamamoto by asking myself what he was NOT. Then what is he searching for, while he never confines himself to one particular art form like painting or photography, wandering from one technique to another?

 

Apparently he goes on wandering because he hasn’t reached the core of what he is searching for. So, perhaps, it’s impossible for the others to explain his position briefly. It seems, however, the common element in his recent works is “water” which forms physical boundaries such as a horizon—a horizontal line—or reflections of light.

 

Just as Yamamoto cannot be named anything, those boundaries are non-existent. There is no substance like a membrane; the boundaries have no quantity at all. Yamamoto materializes such non-existence in the form of, for example, a surface of the water (i.e. accumulated reflections of light) or a horizontal plane emerging from the pebbles attached together.

 

He newly started the series of “print works” that don’t look quite unlike the paintings. Technically, he sprays solvent on the color photocopies to transmit the toners into the paper put under them. For the past paintings and stone works, both in making processes and in resulting pieces, he treated the boundaries as reflecting surfaces (seen from the outside of the water). Now in the “print works,” a new approach is visible: he uses the transmitting technique (seeing from/into the inside of the water), while finished pieces still have reflecting boundaries. It’s not yet clear if this change means a significant turning point in his career. Yamamoto says that he got to the “print works” to break his deadlock in the painting, and that now, having achieved a certain result, he is able to tackle the painting again as well as the prints.

 

Shuji Yamamoto is no longer a painter, a photographer, a sculptor and a print artist. Being none of those things almost equals being Yamamoto himself, and it is true more than ever when he is getting ready for the shows in Osaka and Daegu, South Korea.

 

Osaka City Museum of Modern Art Assistant Curator Tomoyuki Mitsui