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拍品專文
Looking at the ever-changing white sea spray of the Japan Sea and white clouds above him, Saika Itsuro could not stop the pencil in his hand but sketching the whites. He realized colors had become redundant to him. It was around 1960, and from then on the artist only worked on monochrome pictures.
However, working with pencil gray and white wasn’t a simple task. He tried many materials to finalize his own combination of materials. The white parts are mixtures of glue with gofun (powder from shells) and chalk at different ratios. For most of his works, the base is a special Japanese paper called torinoko, made from the fiber of gampi, which is more glossy compared to other types of Japanese paper. The great stretchability of the paper also allows him to apply multiple layers of his original white mixture to achieve a wall-like result. First applying a layer of the white mixture, then drawing with pencil, and repeating this process.
What is to see in Saika Itsuro’s works? The organic looking patterns are not to be defined and they are, just like the sea spray and clouds, ever-changing. They appear to be in familiar forms to those around us, but they also seem alien. The artist’s works are always named Untitled Continuous File, where ‘untitled’ implies the fact that the forms on the paper are not presenting anything concrete – in a sense of the Buddhist term, ‘form is emptiness’. The word ‘continuous’ indicates that each of his works is not solely framed into one specific paper; instead it is the result of a series of minds and actions, and it will continuously be built on. Finally, ‘file’ speaks to his idea of keeping continuous minds being his task. These mysterious maze-looking pictures can be read as his journal on his experiences and thoughts – a monologue about his life.
However, working with pencil gray and white wasn’t a simple task. He tried many materials to finalize his own combination of materials. The white parts are mixtures of glue with gofun (powder from shells) and chalk at different ratios. For most of his works, the base is a special Japanese paper called torinoko, made from the fiber of gampi, which is more glossy compared to other types of Japanese paper. The great stretchability of the paper also allows him to apply multiple layers of his original white mixture to achieve a wall-like result. First applying a layer of the white mixture, then drawing with pencil, and repeating this process.
What is to see in Saika Itsuro’s works? The organic looking patterns are not to be defined and they are, just like the sea spray and clouds, ever-changing. They appear to be in familiar forms to those around us, but they also seem alien. The artist’s works are always named Untitled Continuous File, where ‘untitled’ implies the fact that the forms on the paper are not presenting anything concrete – in a sense of the Buddhist term, ‘form is emptiness’. The word ‘continuous’ indicates that each of his works is not solely framed into one specific paper; instead it is the result of a series of minds and actions, and it will continuously be built on. Finally, ‘file’ speaks to his idea of keeping continuous minds being his task. These mysterious maze-looking pictures can be read as his journal on his experiences and thoughts – a monologue about his life.