Critique of Yazu Yoshitaka’s Unknown -Mountain-

For the first time when I saw Yazu Yoshitaka’s painting Mountain, I was quite astonished by the complex visual movements in this sculpture like painting work. This oil painting was displayed at Art Fair Kyoto 2011 in Japan and was also published on Yoshitaka’s website as a part of his Unknown project.

Constituted by several steady white areas of paint and a number of flowing but linear strokes, the painting gets an abstracted mountain shape. Along with its large scale at around 20’×26’, the work looks like a huge organic formation of both static and restless elements. This painting also doesn’t look like a completely two dimensional work, even though it’s in a black and white color style without much color movement. The black solid lines of paint on very top of the work visually come away from the surface and make them look like real strings connecting the black inner part of the work. The white lines and the edges of the white areas are all very sharp, which look like a separate cutout covering on the black background. Also, for the black background, there is a different darker black layer right beneath the white patterns. Such arrangement of different values makes the painting more three dimensional and more engaged in space.

Although the white lines are quite chaotic and seem to be irregular, they actually all congregate at the center of the mountain and become more and more intense when they approach the center. Therefore, with this central area of the linear movement, the whole work remains much more unity rather than a disordered random distribution of the lines. Further, the contrast between the minute lines and the large mountains are reconciled by their white colors. That is the slight difference between two types of white ties the lines and mountain closely together and makes these lines become a part of the mountain. Such reconciliation also increases the unity of the whole piece.

There are also very typical Japanese elements in Yoshitaka’s painting of the mountain. Like many of the traditional Japanese paintings and woodblock printings, which have the similar theme of depicting the beauty of Mt. Fuji, Yoshitaka’s Mountain has very sharp outlines of the landscapes and clear borderlines between different colors. This way of painting scenery is very usual in Katsushika Hokusai and other Japanese artists’ paintings during Edo period. However, Yoshitaka also tries to combine western media and non-traditional brush technique to produce an uneven surface to make the work more three dimensional. This modernist approach to the classical theme of landscape painting becomes very successful when the artist wants to create a new vision on those general objects in our daily life. That is the idea of mountain in Japanese people’s mind is becoming more and more similar because of the huge number of duplications for those ideal traditional painting works nowadays. Yoshitaka wants to distort this common perspective and creates a new world for perception. Through the new vision, Yoshitaka believes that the viewers will be able to perceive the invisible world either by their imagination or by their knowledge of unknown. Therefore, Yoshitaka created this piece of work to fulfill his idea of the spiritual world.