“The kind of art that we strive to create today must embody the middle way, in which the material and spiritual are merged into one...It must arise from realism (shajitsu) and yet transcend realism.”
—Zenzaburo Kojima, 1935
Nonaka-Hill is pleased to participate in Frieze Masters with a solo presentation dedicated to the groundbreaking work of Yōga master, Zenzaburo Kojima.
Embodying the new globalizing pursuits of Japan’s Meiji and Taisho Eras of his youth, Zenzaburo Kojima journeyed to France in 1923, when he was in his twenties, to seek training in oil painting, a recently imported art practice from the West which brought whole new aesthetic conventions to Japan, becoming known as Yōga (Western painting). Oil painting so challenged the continuum of Japanese artistic creation that, around 1900, academics unified to formally define and secure the pedagogy of traditional Japanese aesthetics and atelier techniques, calling the discipline Nihonga (Japanese painting).
In post-war Japan, Kojima spends his life searching for vibrant, opulent nature to "capture in some way the beauty of what is unstable, what lies delicately between stability and instability." His alternately spare and gestural paintings were often painted in plein-air to reflect what the artist called ‘eternal life,’ a transcendence from observed reality and the individual’s subjective experience of nature. Kojima developed wholly unique genre paintings which are firmly historicized within Japan’s domestic museums’ presentation of Japan’s art of the 20th Century. Remembered as an early pioneer of Yōga, Kojima’s progressive ideals helped open pathways for subsequent generations.
To honor the 130th anniversary of Zenzaburo Kojima’s birth, the Fukuoka Prefectural Museum of Art has opened a major survey exhibition on view through December 10, 2023. Nonaka-Hill announced the representation of the Zenzaburo Kojima estate in 2022. Kojima’s solo exhibitions include the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan (1964), Fukuoka Art Museum (1993, 2012); The Shoto Museum of Art (1998); Fuchu Art Museum (2007).
