KEITA MIYAZAKI JAPAN, b. 1983

 

As in other places around the world, people in Japan have been making things since time immemorial. They have done so with all sorts of purposes, contexts, and methods. Before what we call the modern era, which began in the late 19^th century, works of what were not yet called “painting” and “sculpture” were used for religious purposes, interior decoration, or as a part of daily life. There was also a flourishing industry of publishing woodcuts, highly popular among the common people, and a refined aesthetic culture revolving around practices like the tea ceremony and flower arrangement.

 

As the modernization policy of the 19^th century progressed, these various aspects of aesthetics and culture were recontextualized in terms of “fine art,” a concept imported from the West. Culture, until then closely interwoven with people’s emotional lives and everyday customs, abruptly took on a political character.

 

The authorities of the day coined terms such as kaiga (painting) and chokoku (sculpture) for these new cultural imports, and the things people had been making throughout history were classified as kogei (crafts) to distinguish them from bijutsu (another newly coined term meaning “fine art”). However, the terms were not clearly defined at first, and when the first national school of fine arts, Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko (Tokyo Fine Arts School) was established and its curricula were organized, there were debates over the meanings of “painting,” “sculpture,” and “crafts.”

 

Tokyo School of Fine Arts was a cultural hot spot where art, politics and government intersected. Fine art was required to embody knowledge, understanding, mental and spiritual depth that showed Japan was not inferior to the “great Western powers,” and discussions on how to divide the school into academic departments and how to conduct education drew on the hierarchy of Western art. This hierarchy placed painting and sculpture at the top and crafts at the bottom. And while painting and sculpture were assigned central importance in a reorganized narrative of art history and a newly organized system of fine art education, crafts occupied a central position in Japan’s economic strategy, which entailed exporting Japanese cultural products overseas (while conversely, “modernized” Japanese painting and sculpture were not seen at the time as embodying the quintessential Japanese aesthetic.)

 

In light of this history, it is easy to see that the Art-Crafts Course (as the Department of Crafts was then called) did not occupy a very comfortable position at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. While charged with preserving a cultural legacy that had existed in the region and the nation since ancient times, it was thrown into ongoing battles over “fine art” tied to global politics. This structure remained in place at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, established in 1949 as the successor to the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. In 2002, more than a century after Japan’s modernization began, Miyazaki Keita enrolled in the Metal Casting Course in the Department of Crafts at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (known today at Tokyo University of the Arts), and says that right away he felt like he had come to the wrong place. This evidently had much to do with that place’s veiled yet powerfully charged political nature.

 

However, it seems that the professors and instructors were open-minded about the direction of their young students’ development, and Miyazaki spent a total of 10 years in the Department of Crafts, with time out to study sculpture at the Royal College of Art in the UK, eventually earning a doctorate. There is no doubt that he owes his solid technical mastery to his time at the university. Creatively, however, a turning point came when he was studying abroad. He says that at first he struggled with the different environment and ways of thinking, but gradually he arrived at a new artistic approach by combining, recombining and studying relationships between old, weathered car parts and pieces of folded paper and felt resembling origami. The constructions look like bizarre creatures, or perhaps plants from the future.

 

Miyazaki’s work is characterized by hybridity of hard and soft materials. The industrial parts make the pieces look powerful, but the “origami” elements have a gentle, delicate feel. The latter relates to the translucency of flowers and the beauty of imperfection advocated by Okakura Tenshin, first dean of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, in his The Book of Tea (1906). These were values that clearly differed from the Western aesthetics of the day.

 

At the same time, Miyazaki’s work is neither anti-modernist nor neo-traditionalist. In terms of the mentality behind his works, intriguingly, Miyazaki says he draws inspiration from the theories of David Harvey. According to Karl Marx, modern society means society dominated by capitalism, and Harvey criticizes global capitalism and describes its dangers and potential catastrophes based on Marx’s ideas about capital.

 

Miyazaki’s art can be seen in the rich context of “art-crafts” before art was distorted by politics, while simultaneously encompassing the history of modernization, the lines on the world map of that era, the globalization of today, and premonitions of the future. There is a dynamic of being pulled in several directions but staunchly adhering to the middle ground without falling to any side, giving Miyazaki’s art a sense of tension. Some of Miyazaki’s works incorporate sound, and when approaching, the viewer may hear ethnic instruments, sounds accompanying the departures of Japanese trains, fetal heartbeats, or sandstorms. For me, at least, these sounds are vaguely disturbing, as if rendering audible the dissonance that resonates throughout contemporary society.

 

Miyazaki’s sculptures are like mutant flowers that bloom and thrive amid historical, political and philosophical conflict. They might be called metaphors for us, human beings living through these troubled times. Their bottomless well of organic energy is ominous, but beckons us to peer further in.