Watari Museum of Contemporary Art

curator: Maria Brewińska
organizers: Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Zachęta - National Gallery of Art
partner: Polish Institute in Tokyo
cooperation: Fundacja Razem Pamoja

The exhibition Koji Kamoji. Don’t Let the Unnecessary Overshadow the Whole offers an insight into the work of one of Poland’s most important artists. This is the artist's first solo exhibition in his native country. Kōji Kamoji is a painter as well as a creator of installations, objects and performances. Born in Tokyo in 1935, he studied at the Musashino Academy of Fine Arts from 1953 to 1958. Influenced by his uncle, Ryōchū Umeda (梅田 良忠), a translator of Polish literature, and his stories about Poland, Kamoji decided to continue his education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where he graduated in 1966. He has been living and working in Poland since 1959. He is among the leading artists who have shaped the main currents of Polish post-war art since the 1960s. His works have become an integral part of Polish art history and national cultural heritage. Most of the artist’s exhibitions have been held in Poland, and he has participated in many important group presentations of Polish art in Europe and the United States. His works are in the collections of the most prominent museums and galleries in Poland.

The roots of Koji Kamoji’s art lie in the traditions of both Western and Polish contemporary art from the period of postwar modernization, when new movements such as conceptualism, minimalism, and new abstraction were taking shape. Japanese culture has always played an important role in his artistic explorations, and continues to do so now more than ever. Polish art critics place his work within a broad paradigm: the Polish neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and ‘70s, but also within a broader framework of universalism and the search for fundamental principles in art and life – close to the values of Eastern philosophy. His conceptual approach to art, shaped by working at the intersection of Western and Japanese culture, allowed him to quickly become part of the Polish art scene. Henryk Stażewski was perhaps the most important artist he encountered in Poland, followed by Edward Krasiński. The doyen and pioneer of the Polish avant-garde, Stażewski, who shared a warm friendship with Kamoji, once told him: “Change slowly.” But this is an inherent quality of Kamoji’s artistic practice: through a long creative process combined with deep self-observation and patient work on a painting or object, he explores fundamental ideas related to human existence, the nature of the things that surround us, and his own existence and attitude. Through abstract and semi-abstract forms, he explores both himself and the world, simply seeking harmony in art – and through art, in life. Reflecting on the consistency of his artistic quest, he says:

“I am not particularly interested in form; what interests me is being – more precisely, the feeling of being. I believe that form is the result of my search for and expression of the feeling of being. In this sense, although the form of my artistic expression may change, the core of my work remains the same. This applies to all forms of my work-painting, installation, performance, and so on. For me, the most important thing is being – the experience of being. In a state of deep concentration, being takes on a clearer form, and that is what I try to capture. Being itself has no form; we assign form and color to it in order to see it, to make it visible. My works take different forms, but like a compass, they all point in one direction – the direction of being. I think this has remained unchanged from the very beginning to this day.”^[1]

The exhibition at WATARI-UM, the Watari Museum serves as a small retrospective of works created over six decades. The selection, however, is enough to highlight the essential qualities of this art – the alignment of life and work, visual minimalism, the deliberate elimination of things, philosophical reflection – or simply attention turned inward – along with the pursuit of harmony: harmony with ourselves, with nature, and with our surroundings. The exhibition brings together a variety of Kamoji’s works, all of which are inextricably linked to the artist’s deeply internalized experience.

How did Kamoji’s artistic career begin in Poland? It all began at Galeria Foksal in Warsaw, where from 1967 he regularly presented his work in the traditional white cube space, helping to shape the history of this important gallery alongside leading figures of postwar Polish art – including the aforementioned Henryk Stażewski and Edward Krasiński, as well as Włodzimierz Borowski, Edward Narkiewicz, Zbigniew Gostomski, and Tadeusz Kantor. He became close friends with many of them. A year after graduating, the artist held his first solo exhibition at Galeria Foksal (1967), where he showed his diploma works, which attracted the attention of the art world. Particularly striking are archival black-and-white photographs of the exhibition: in the gallery space, we see a section of the floor – a field of white gravel – with relief paintings arranged on it, and Kamoji standing in the background. The relief or box-like objects, known as “Pruszków Images”, were multi-layered compositions with carved openings and added elements. These works were created in the 1960s in Pruszków, near Warsaw, where Kamoji lived with his family. At the time, he was grappling with the hardships and the bleak reality of communist Poland, which he coped with by creating a series of compositions that were quite complex to make. He recalled that after work – he was employed as a translator for a Japanese company in Warsaw – he would take off his suit and immediately immerse himself in painting. It was during this period that Kamoji created such remarkable works as For the Wall of a Temple (1967), Lagoon (1964-67), and Rainbow (1965). Both their form and the ideas they contain are strikingly contemporary and represent the essence of the artist’s creative stance. In creating these abstract works, Kamoji employed a reductive approach and, characteristic of his practice, used natural materials such as wood, metal, and stone. The pieces are monochromatic and simple, yet they encapsulate the essence of nature – fragile yet powerful. They reflect a process of creation – both physical and intellectual – aimed at making the invisible visible. The artist once wrote that what is most important to him, both in art and in life, is the ability to feel air and space. His “hollowed-out paintings,” with penetrating openings that seem to let these elements flow through, were among his first works to express his search for harmony and the idea of mutual permeation.

This process of seeking harmony – a certain accuracy, a search for the essence of oneself, of being, of the being of things – always coupled with a deep self-awareness, is articulated in one of Kamoji’s most significant installations, Two Poles (1972), composed of four paintings and a stone. The artist’s introduction at the beginning of this book refers precisely to this piece. Its creation was a clear struggle with the material – stone as an autonomous being and the philosophy of its existence: an attempt to translate the existence of material reality onto the plane of painting. Throughout the creative process, the artist identified specific points on the canvas through which he drew lines that symbolically expressed the nature of the stone, as well as the presence of the air and space surrounding it. Like many of his works, Two Poles emerged from a process of searching for the right position – accuracy – while also embodying the artist’s state of focus and emotion.

An essential feature of Koji Kamoji’s life and art is his ability to integrate knowledge, experience, and emotion, his desire for inner harmony, and his profound self-awareness. His installation Draft (1975) was created as part of a series of four exhibitions – Opening, Mirror, Line, Draft – at Foksal Gallery. It consists of delicate Japanese paper sheets, suspended at eye level, with circular cut-outs that sway gently in the draft. Kamoji recalls that the first time he made a work with perforated paper, he was struck by a sudden sense of old age, even though he was only 40 years old at the time. He continues to reconstruct the installation in new exhibitions, and this fleeting feeling returns to him in new realities. This is a work about existence and the passage of time – perhaps revealing the identity of the artwork as inseparable from the artist’s life. Kamoji grapples with the mystery of time, which eludes conceptual thinking. He touches on one of the most fundamental human experiences: transience – yet he does so without pathos, tragedy, or fear. A similar approach is evident in his series dedicated to a friend named Sasaki. The artist’s works often draw on personal experiences, one of the most poignant being the memory of a close friend’s suicide during his youth in Japan. On one of the paintings from Sasaki’s Moon series (1995), we read: “The site of S. Sasaki’s suicide. After taking sleeping pills, thirst forced him to crawl to the seashore, where he died." Despite his decision to take his own life, Sasaki demonstrated in his final moments a will to live that, according to the artist, is fundamental to human existence. A delicate red line traces the path Sasaki took in his final moments. This haunting, epitaph-like piece exists between the silent cry of helpless defiance and the quiet tenderness of remembrance. At times, Kamoji returns to collective traumatic experiences, as in the installation Hiroshima (1995) which represents an attempt to come to terms with the unbearable memory of trauma contained in stones collected in Hiroshima, which served as key elements of the installations. His work goes beyond mere visual representation, using his lived history to express collective experiences.

Just as he turns inward, Kamoji also seeks to understand things and deepen his connection to the world around him. His Still Life compositions (2003/2013)-made up of small objects, memories, stories, pebbles, a glass of water, an x-ray, a mirror, a book, and more – reveal his extraordinary sensitivity to things. Each element is touched by thin arcs cut from sheets of metal, which the artist calls “instruments for transmitting the voices of things.” They are meant to help us hear objects, because, as the artist emphasizes, “To feel things, listening is more important than seeing.” Here Kamoji touches on the experience of a thing’s being – its solitude and inner silence. He attempts to identify with objects not through words, but by eliminating them – by listening closely to their silence.

Intense concentration, combined with the repetition of gestures involved in drawing lines and forms, takes on personal meaning and a spiritual dimension in the act of drawing – evoking a kind of inner alchemy aimed at transformation from within. The wall of drawings (2011-2018) is an example – perhaps even evidence of an inner transformation. This drawn world of Kamoji consists of simple graphic signs. Each drawing is the trace of a single experience, a meditation, a fleeting illumination, a result of mastering chaos. The artist reflects:

“I think contemporary art has become very elaborate and complicated lately. That is why I wanted to return to the simplest methods, using only paper, brush, ink and white, as I used to do. Simple lines define the depth of focus. A brushstroke is a touch. Nature simply exists and is also a space for contemplation. It’s not about drawing the outer appearance – it’s about drawing the core, the axis of each thing, and the air that surrounds it. It’s about looking at the thing and talking to it. It’s about entering into things, becoming one with the thing. What, then, is drawing? It’s about the core, the seed in the fruit, the inner need, the form of concentration, purity, the challenge of the new, the striving for that goal, the achievement of the goal, the elimination of the unnecessary, the release of thought, meditation, the search for verticality, a well. Drawing is like digging a well, seeing things anew, revealing the essence of a thing, the form of concentration, and ultimately a spiritual exercise – a path to oneself."[2]

Many of the artist’s works involve the use of water, introducing new meanings related to aquatic symbolism, which refers primarily to the life-giving power of this element-a symbol of the desire for life and the preservation of vital energy.  Kamoji’s long sea voyage to Poland in 1959 made him acutely aware of the unique beauty of this aspect of nature. The feeling of the infinity of water, sky and air is expressed in many of his works. Body (1980) and Still Life (2003/2013) manifest the role of water, on which all existence depends. Kamoji reinterprets this motif by creating large-scale installations with aluminum sheets that imitate water surfaces, or by digging wells in search of water, as in his well-known installation Haiku: Water (1994), realized at the Municipal Public Library in Legionowo, near Warsaw. Alongside such eye-catching works, he also creates small, quietly aesthetic objects that invite meditation-or at least heightened attention. Working at the intersection of minimalism and conceptual art, Kamoji engages the viewer in a different kind of perception-one that is more sensory. He invites us to look and listen, to pause and examine our relationship to the world. It seems that Kamoji’s intense encounters with nature during his voyage to Poland, as well as later experiences, are rooted in a distinctly Japanese, intuitive sensitivity to the natural world.

“When I look at prehistoric clay figures (haniwa), I get the impression that from the beginning of history to the present, the people of the Japanese islands have been characterized by simplicity in their view of the surrounding world, as well as by an aversion to ornamentation. I think this can be clearly seen in the history of Japanese art. Another characteristic is a tendency to appreciate and focus on the small things in daily life, and to express this through small forms such as haiku. When I painted small works, a thought accompanied me: »A vessel can be simple.« I was thinking of a glass of water. It has never been the strength of the Japanese to build a big philosophical system or to realistically reproduce the world around us. They prefer to express their connection to nature and people in a simple way. In this respect, I feel that although I have been living in Poland, in the Western world, for many years, I have changed very little.”^[3]

^[1] Koji Kamoji in conversation with Jaromir Jedliński, in: Koji Kamoji. Modlitwy do bytu, exh. cat., (Galeria Muzalewska, Poznań, 2016,) 27.
^[2] Koji Kamoji, private notes.
^[3] Ibidem.