The many, scary faces of Tsuruya Kokei ‘Tsuruya Kokei: Modern Kabuki Prints Revised & Revisited’
All the political world today is a kabuki stage, peopled with flamboyant, bellicose and vindictive characters with faces painted in perpetual scowls.
That’s a silly observation from looking at a critical mass of kabuki actor prints for the first time at this particular point in time — probably because the exhibition “Tsuruya Kōkei: Modern Kabuki Prints Revised & Revisited” gets some of its charge from the visceral body language captured in each portrait.
There also are more satisfying windows into the show, which is layered with histories of kabuki theater, visual art and pop culture. Organized by Kendall Brown at the University of Southern California’s Pacific Asia Museum, which owns an important collection of prints by Kōkei, the exhibition is now up at its only other U.S. venue, Asia Society Texas Center.
Kabuki actor prints have been a popular genre of Japanese woodblock printmaking for centuries, mass-produced for broad audiences.
To help provide some context, the show’s first room includes a costume and a video monitor with excerpts of performances by some of the actors Kōkei observed. It can be pretty funny business.
Introduced by women and popularized by prostitutes in the early 1600s, kabuki initially was a raw and raucous antidote to the aristocrats’ graceful noh theater. To clamp down on the mischief that ensued, Japan’s rulers banned women from performing kabuki within a few decades, launching the tradition of all-male troupes who still enact intense plots of forbidden love and historic rivalries with over-the-top, stylized movement.
Kōkei, now 74, established himself as a contemporary master of kabuki actor prints during 22 years as resident artist of Tokyo’s renowned Kabukiza Theater, from 19782000. He was successful enough to launch a club of subscribers who bought his work.
Not just documenting famous actors in familiar roles, Kōkei conveyed their transformative powers, also making it clear he’s showing viewers his interpretation of a performance by fixing his figures in space and time against plain backgrounds. With an eye to the genre’s history, early on he painted their flesh with white gofun, or ground seashell, like the Edo period’s short-lived but brilliant Tōshūsai Sharaku, whose bold, dynamic compositions he also emulated.
Larger than life
As expressive as his subjects, Kōkei developed several of his own distinctive actor-print styles, purposefully distorting figures or zooming in to capture their larger-than-life presence.
You always see the face and the hands, and they’re often out of scale. Sometimes he concentrated on simple elegance; at others, he layered on muted shades. The prints are so varied, from one room of the show to the next, they look like they could be the work of several people.
“In the visual vocabulary of kabuki prints over the years,
Kōkei’s work just leaps,” says Bridget Bray, Asia Society Texas Center’s curator. (She knows the territory well; before moving to Houston, she worked at the Asia Pacific Museum.)
Aside from their strong, graphic qualities and emotional power, Kōkei’s prints also are technical marvels. He carves, prints and publishes his own designs without the help of
technicians, as many print designers do; also flaunting his craftsmanship with challenging materials, Bray notes.
He prefers blocks made of magnolia wood, which is softer than the commonly used cherry. He prints on smooth, lustrous and translucent paper derived from the wild ganpo shrub, which is less absorbent than the traditional kozo paper made of mulberry bark. And to avoid repeating himself, he chops up his blocks after producing limited editions of each image.
Sometimes they get reused but not to make new prints.
One of the show’s two prints of “Bandō Mitsugorō IX as Ukiyo Matahei in ‘Keisei Hangonkō’ ” is framed with the cut-up wood blocks from which Kōkei produced it in 1987. The poetic image alone stops my heart. It conveys the slumped, worldweary expression of a character Kōkei may have identified with personally: Ukiyo Matahei is a frustrated older artist whose passion finally brings him respect late in life.
Focusing on himself
Kōkei is a third-generation artist but not formally trained. A grandson of the famous Nakazawa Hiromitsu, who made naturalistic images of landscapes and beauties, he taught himself to draw and paint as a kid. He chose a safer career, until one day, at age 32, he decided to chuck a dreary office job and follow his dream. His story is partly about life choices, Bray suggests. “It’s about what we do with our time when time is precious.”
Kōkei decided in 2000 to use some of the time he has left to focus on himself, literally. During the next 17 years, he produced about 100 self-portraits. The exhibition includes several — and as with the leitmotif of his kabuki actor prints, the drawings emphasize heads and hands — his keys to the soul.
In a self-portrait from 2010, Kōkei gazes at the viewer with an open hand extended, maybe summoning a pose from artist self-portraits of the Western art canon. A more eerie 2013 selfportrait depicts his face as a floating death mask above a frail, disembodied hand.
Manga and hip-hop
Kabuki prints and other aspects of Asian art history roar into the 21st century with the show’s final gallery of wickedly fun works by other artists, including some young guns schooled in manga, anime and hip-hop.
New Zealander Andrew Archer’s “The Black Mamba (Kobe Bryant)” mixes Japanese woodblock prints and NBA culture, which he sees as a kind of universal language. Los Angeles’ Gavin Fujita also finds the kabuki spirit in pro sports with “The Saints,” a 2008 mural featuring a fierce warrior who appears to be a linebacker for the New Orleans Saints.
Just when you think Kōkei might have been upstaged, you come upon a few of his most recent works. He, too, has a pop sensibility, along with a reverence for art history. And he loves cats, who can be silly or serious. Kitties take on several funny guises in his “Cat Sukoroku” of 2011. Kōkei shows another side of himself with 2015’s “Kumadori,” which combines five layers of color-coded kabuki makeup patterns into a face inspired by the work of the Renaissance painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo.
Most recently, he has returned to printmaking, turning out exquisite portraits for a series depicting the five master artists of Japanese
Translated as “pictures of the floating world,” the aesthetic involves depictions of earthly beauty and pleasures, full of sinuous lines and vivid colors. The head and a hand are back in a 2017 portrait of Katsushika Hokusai, the creator of the iconic print “Great Wave Off Kanagawa,” who is stooped over his brush. A beautiful cat looks over his shoulder.
Kōkei is channeling history, acknowledging his place in it — and using his time wisely.