Hinako Miyabayashi

Galerie Guido W. Baudach is pleased to present its first solo exhibition of works by Hinako Miyabayashi for this year‘s Gallery Weekend Berlin. Under the title wood, oil and spiral, the Tokyo-based artist is showing new paintings in a wide variety of formats.

Hinako Miyabayashi paints with colors and other materials on various substrates. But what forms does she create in doing so? And where on the respective surface does she paint the colors? How does she apply them? Thickly, thinly, in clusters or scattered like by a firework? – Many small decisions lead to an art work that adresses a multitude of thoughts and feelings. Hinako Miyabayashi paints her pictures in such a way that all the colors used remain clearly recognizable. Through her gift of taking the painting materials seriously, she draws us to her picture and lends us invisible hare ears, with which we can hear the colors.

Although this metamorphosis remains a fantasy, as such it fulfills the purpose of illustrating the cosmos that the artist develops in her practice. Instead of creating traditional or even representational paintings, Miyabayashi‘s work explores the painting materials and their properties in the pathos of transience themselves – as elements of the living world with an inevitable end. Without depicting anything concrete, a natural landscape or the like, she creates paintings of vivid atmosphere that are at the same time wrapped in a mood that expresses empathy with all things.

It is a transformation with the concrete means of painting such as surface, color, ductus and composition. This creates a polyphonic poetry and offers a synaesthetic intoxication with parallel worlds of color and sound. Hinako Miyabayashi often develops her settings against an unprocessed background. The resulting negative space follows a precise aesthetic principle. The areas left open create a constant moment of suggestion in the picture. Beneath the unfathomable open space is the depth of a mysterious body of water. The imaginary creatures emerge from it: A lively hare grazes on the bank. If we follow him, we end up like Alice in his burrow, fall into a hole and enter a wonderland – or take a trip into art history.

Albrecht Dürer‘s Feldhase (English: Hare), one of the most popular works of art in the western world, is also remarkably situated in such an indeterminate space, as there is no location for the cute animal other than the sheet of paper on which the hare is painted in watercolors. Instead, every targeted spot of color and every fine line in its fur unites to form the wholeness of the lifelike image. This hare looks close enough to touch, so deceptively real that you think it could hop away at any moment as soon as it detects danger with its perked up ears. Dürer has created a picture here so similar to reality, so perfectly modeled on nature, that it gives the impression that he, the artist, has the divine power to breathe life into things. – But what lives will soon die. Dürer dedicated another famous picture to the inevitable sadness inherent in the thoughtful contemplation of all living things: the engraving Melencolia, in English: Melancholy – a human emotion that in Western culture usually is to be kept in check through virtuous diligence.

The feeling of memento mori, which describes the inner pain of seeing the ideal of youthful beauty and perfection inevitably fade away, this melancholy is understood completely differently in Hinako Miyabayashi‘s work. The artist herself says of her work: “I paint like a ‘hand’ that ‘accepts’ the individual textures and everything else that belongs to the respective material.” This is reminiscent of the Japanese term ‚nare‘, which can be translated as ‚hand shine‘ and describes the beauty of things through vividly preserved traces of their use. Objects that have been used are deliberately left worn and dirty, as this is the only way to preserve the characteristics of their use and create a symbol of the empathic relationship between people and things.

Hinako Miyabayashi is familiar with both Eastern and Western aesthetic concepts. She studied not only in Japan, but also at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she further deepened her interest in Western art and culture. She is part of a tradition of artists who have fruitfully promoted the intellectual and spiritual exchange of cultures. Interculturality between Japan and the West has been developing in many areas since the forced opening of the country in the mid-19th century, following a long period of strict self-imposed isolation. With regard to the visual arts, one need only think of the enormous influence that the emergence of Japanese woodblock prints had on early Western modernist painting or, conversely, that Abstract Expressionism from the USA had on the painters of the Gutai movement in Japan after the Second World War. Here as there, however, the elementary approach to life and the world as well as the corresponding narratives are still noticeably different today.

Looking at Hinako Miyabayashi‘s works from a Western perspective, it is easy to be tempted to emphasize the foreign, the exotic and to pay less attention to the wonderful adventures of perception and reflection that the artist invites us to embark on by spreading out before us in her pictures a world that is entirely her own and mediates between the cultures.

—Sassa Trülzsch

Soil, asphalt, stones, and countless particles gather to form the ground. As time passes and the surface contracts, cracks appear. On this ground, people walk and run, leaves fall. The cracks become borders—lines that arise not because the surface tears apart, but because the surfaces press against one another. Without cracks, lines would not emerge. Rather than cutting out or excluding something within a rectangular frame, as in a painting or photograph, I probe the ground as if to sense the traces before and after, including what cannot be seen.

I draw with my hands. Canvas, paper, wood—what are generally called “supports” (materials that constitute the surface holding the paint film) appear before me like “hands that receive.” The hand moves. It is not that either myself or the support moves independently; rather, contact begins as if the two sides touch and confirm each other.

I stretch cotton onto a wooden frame. I dissolve glue that has swelled overnight in boiling water and seal the entire surface of the cloth. The damp cloth is heavy; it expands and contracts with moisture and naturally becomes taut. The weave becomes clearly visible. Onto it I place sand. Or I set down a sheet of paper so thin it might tear at a touch. Sometimes I embed wire. After drying overnight, the cloth becomes as light as the shell of a monaka wafer and leans against the wall. The dried paper and sand, too, look different from the day before. The act of drawing has already begun.

The cloth urges me to pick up a large brush laden with oil and reveals the movement of particles. I load coarse pigment onto the brush to form the “bones” of the cloth—bones that may later dissolve. Though the first stroke begins as structure, in the end it makes me forget the beginning. My brush moves as if pressed into the weave. Particles and stones of varying coarseness run across the surface, remaining without turning entirely into color. I slide charcoal across the sand laid on the cloth. The rough charcoal particles settle in a state that is neither line nor surface. It is like touching water. Like searching for alphabet biscuits among soils and sands of various sizes.

I add color with masking tape or draw lines with a long rod-like brush. In two meters of cloth, I see a space of four meters. Holding the rod far from the bristles, I search for something beyond the strength of my arm. Yet I cannot escape the fact that it is still my arm, and it moves in resistance to the motion of the particles. With a rag and turpentine I wipe away particles—not erasing, but making the lines stand, which is also drawing. The weave, pigment particles, soaked paint, and colors on the verge of becoming planes create distances.

I attach charcoal to the end of a long stick and write letters—characters without meaning as language. They stand, lie down, dance. I sometimes wipe them with a rag or blend them with a large brush. When facing a work larger than my body, I do not attempt to shape it into a painting, but rather consider how to unmake it as a painting. I aim not to tuck the work into my pocket (into the eye), but to brush against its jutting edges.

When painting with a brush, I look not at the tip’s destination but at the changing surroundings. I look at the four corners of the painting from the inner skin of my head. I let the center of the painting float. I do not aim to complete the work. I find a resting place for it—by creating a sense of lack—and then step away.

—Hinako Miyabayashi

Hinako Miyabayashi: An Explorer of the Exquisitely Nuanced In-Between

Miyabayashi’s pictorial expression seems highly abstract, yet it refuses to be contained within the category of abstract painting. Although her canvases are abstract, they are not what is conventionally called “pure abstraction.” Underlying them is, so to speak, a lucid realism: light and wind, and the flow of space and time, are always perceptible within the picture plane.

After all, painters paint because “the world” exists; even in abstraction, once the connection to the world is severed, art becomes an anemic practice and ends in a dead end. Whether realism or idealism, without some manner of approach to “the world” at the root of creation, painting will always stand on the brink of crisis. In Miyabayashi’s case, what lies at the foundation is realism. She keeps a distance from any inclination to conceptualize nature by tying it to some transcendent existence; instead, she sharpens her senses within the continuity of the everyday, savoring the fact that she herself is part of nature, and beginning her work by perceiving the various aspects of nature and things.

Miyabayashi once stated that her intention was “to grasp in multiple ways the time and atmosphere that things possess, and to unsettle the viewer’s consciousness through that vantage point.” In that context she recounted the following experience: “Watching the snow falling silently and continuously, I felt that there were multiple layers in this world, and the way the snow kept falling into the distance until it disappeared seemed similar to the kind of space I wanted to paint.”[*1] Later she elaborated: “It had neither beginning nor end, and each flake of snow seemed to be marking its own distinct and certain time.”[*2]

For Miyabayashi, the act of making is nothing other than an attempt to probe, through a careful and tension-filled dialogue with the picture surface, the true nature of such moments when she “unintentionally comes into contact with a phenomenon occurring right before her eyes and is struck with a jolt,”[*3] gradually releasing that into clarity, and thereby “generating within the painting a sense of new time…”[*4] What is important here is that Miyabayashi’s “layers” are not merely spatial. They are grasped simultaneously in terms of the aspects of time and movement. Her remark that “to paint in oil is to see layers”[*5] must be understood in this sense.

It is therefore only natural that her expression differs from the kind—commonly seen today—that evokes the “layers” of computer graphic software, which diagrammatically and unambiguously designate the front–back relationships of elements. The elements in Miyabayashi’s pictorial field are not to be subsumed into pre-existing planar, static layers. Each lives its own inherent stratum of movement and time—so much so that “layer” may hardly be the right word—and enlivens the pictorial space. For Miyabayashi, layers are nothing other than the qualitative differences of space, time, and motion, together with their heterogeneous, dynamic interrelations and mutual implications. They are precisely the “layers” that constitute “the world.”

Turning to Miyabayashi’s practice as a whole, it is noteworthy that she is concerned not only with purely visual elements such as color and form. She keenly attunes her tactile, epidermal, and somatic senses to the space and air of a place, its humidity and warmth or cold, the textures of things, and even their atmospheres—extending her sensitivity broadly to her own body and whatever surrounds it.

For example, Miyabayashi remarks that when facing a large canvas, she becomes conscious of the space that occupies the distance between herself and the picture surface, and that as she moves, that space and the painting move and change together. This naturally causes the motion of her brush to curve. Her gestures are thus not simply actions applied to a plane in accordance with a fixed intention or aim; rather, they are closer to movements that grope for the space around her. The characteristic lines of depth in her work arise from this process.

If we turn to her technique, it is evident that she has a strong interest in supports and their materials. She avoids ready-made canvases coated with white gesso, instead creating grounds with her own priming agents composed of natural materials such as animal glue. She favors as supports unbleached linen or brown jute fabric and pays meticulous attention to their grain—whether fine, coarse, or uneven—when choosing them. She further layers her support by adhering various fabrics and Japanese papers to the surface. Confronting the unexpected variations in the physical contact between the brush and supports that vary in hardness, softness, roughness, and smoothness, she responds with fresh sensitivity. For Miyabayashi, the support is both the “place of painting” and a crucial element that participates in expression through its own agency. Needless to say, this approach is rooted in her pronounced tactile sensibility.

Her strong insistence on the support, however, originates in her realization that the “whiteness” of conventional supports—such as ready-made canvases—too readily accepts her “expression,” allowing the work to proceed under the sole “dominion” of the expressive subject. She felt a certain “arrogance” in this, and thus sensed the need to neutralize it by accepting an element of “externality.” This insight seeks to discover a new “necessity” of expression within the tension between expression and its outside.[*6]

Miyabayashi’s practice does not end within the confines of the pictorial interior. She carefully examines the many factors and relations surrounding herself and her act of expression, letting her sensibility permeate them without bias, and—with a refined sense of equilibrium and a will toward tension—seems to be unearthing rich veins of possibility within those in-between domains.

—Osamu Fukushi

[*1] Hinako Miyabayashi, “(Afterword),” Hinako Miyabayashi Portfolio, privately published, 2021, p. 160. PDF

[*2] Hinako Miyabayashi, “(Statement for the solo exhibition at Galerie Bernd Kugler),” September 2023. https://www.berndkugler.at/exhibitions/2023/hinako-miyabayashi/

[*3] Ibid.

[*4] Miyabayashi, op. cit. (*1), p. 160. Emphasis in original.

[*5] Hinako Miyabayashi, “Production,” unpublished manuscript, January 2023.

[*6] The content of this paragraph is based on my conversations and email exchanges with Miyabayashi, as well as unpublished materials provided by the artist, between October 2022 and December 2023.

It is clear from Miyabayashi's words that she seeks to connect with the surroundings and objects she contemplates, expressing the subtle sensory nuances from deep within herself. This careful and intimate poetry of hers is also evident in her work titles, and her words and images seem inextricably linked. However, the core of her art is not concerned with poems, but with the impressive transformation of that lyrical sensation into painting. For her, what remains undescribed is painting.

The ancient Roman poet Horace is credited with the saying, "A poem is like a painting (Ut pictura poesis)." In China, on the other hand, there is an old proverb that states: "A poem is a painting with a voice, a painting is a poem without a voice."

In "Laokoon" (1766), Gotthold Lessing distinguished visual art from literature, drawing a clear line between poetry and painting. Clement Greenberg deepened this differentiation, focusing on material-specific form and establishing formalism as the theoretical foundation of modern art. In his writings, he also commented on Eastern art.

"Actually, not one of the original "abstract expressionists" -least of all Kline- has felt more than a cursory interest in Oriental art. The sources of their art lie entirely in the West; what resemblances to Oriental modes may be found in it are an effect of convergence at the most, and of accident at the least." ("American-Type" Painting / Clement Greenberg, 1955).

Maybe that's the way it is. Does Asian art not fit the "form" he established?

In China, in ancient times, the art of writing was as highly regarded as poetry and painting. The cornerstones of fine arts are "writing and painting", true to the idea of "the symbiosis of poem, writing and painting". This notion is based on the idea that poems and painting are inextricably linked. In their origins, writing and painting used the same brush, ink, and paper, and came from a shared source. It was not uncommon for paintings to include poetry. The distinct aesthetic sensibility for Chinese poems, writing and painting arrived in Japan alongside profound Buddhist thought.

Handwriting is poetry and visual art at the same time. In the most fundamental sense, there is no demarcation between the two. They represent meaning, matter, physicality, shape, sound, fragment, abstraction, relationships, vacancy, and they are borderless. Thus, writing is in a perpetual state of form-finding, since it cannot yet be reduced to a primordial form. This is also the case with Miyabayashi's painting.

The writing system "Hiragana" preferred by Miyabayashi was created in the 9th century by simplifying the Kanji which originated in China (Chinese script) and is only used in Japan. Hiragana (feminine handwriting), in contrast to the formal Kanji (masculine script), was used mainly in private letters and notes. Many kanji originated as ideograms, with each kanji having its own meaning. Hiragana, on the other hand, are a reduction, distortion, or fragment of kanji that represents only its sound and has no independent meaning. It is a sound that is created from the form.

Amidst the continuously falling snow, Miyabayashi recognizes the multi-faceted nature of the world. She senses fragments of many different eras, although right now the snow is filling the field of vision and transforming the world into a uniform white.

Miyabayashi's artwork is not focused on form, not on materiality or even action. It is not about depictions, meanings, appearances, representations, symbols, signs, or immersion. It is about "presence." It is an emotional ambush. It is more connected with "approach" than with a reality. It is made up of subtle elements that overlap and line up like sounds, tactile sensations, echoes, and light reflections.

It is the perception of the present. The little something that is transforming just before our eyes assails us. In that moment when we approach the world, we come into contact with the perception that is in front of us. In this sense, Miyabayashi's paintings are, beyond specific boundaries, open to all.

—Nobuhiko Murayama