---

AN UNUSUAL MUSEUM IN SOUTH-CENTRAL JAPAN, NEAR NAGOYA, SHOWCASES THE ARTIST’S WORK OF RECENT YEARS

by Edward M. Gómez

HEKINAN, AICHI PREFECTURE, JAPAN — We last checked in on the Japanese contemporary artist Issei Nishimura in early 2023, on the occasion of his solo exhibition at Heartfield Gallery in Nagoya, a large city in south-central Japan that is an important commercial-industrial center and the home of numerous universities and historical sites.

The reclusive artist, who was born in 1978, lives there with his parents in a simple house surrounded by a garden, in a quiet neighborhood. He rarely ventures out from his compound, where he is most content in his studio, with his art supplies, his guitar — he’s a big fan of and has been inspired by the soulful spirit of American blues music — and his cat.

This summer, かいじゅう(“Kaijū,” meaning “Monster”), a new documentary film about Nishimura that was directed, photographed, and produced by Tomoya Ise, and released by Planetafilm, has been making the rounds of art-house cinemas in Tokyo and other cities in Japan. (See a trailer for the film, in Japanese, here.)

It offers a vivid portrait of an artist whose dedication to — and intriguing absorption in — his art-making is as intense as the impact of many of his paintings and drawings is startling, especially to viewers who encounter them in person for the first time.

Now, at the Hekinan-shi Tetsugaku Taikenmura Mugaen, a small park with a museum whose mission is to bring together the thought-provoking, spirit-stirring effects of philosophy and art, a large selection of Nishimura’s works is on view, through September 29, 2024, in “Shinkaigyo, hekikai oyogu” (“Monstrous Fish, Sinking in the Abyss, Swimming in the Blue Sea”). The exhibition has been organized by Yutaka Miyawaki, the director of Galerie Miyawaki in Kyoto, which has served as Nishimura’s primary representative for more than a decade.

The setting for the exhibition could not be more unexpected; it’s also way off the well-beaten paths of Japan’s art world and of most seekers of typical tourist attractions. Hekinan is an affluent, small city located to the south of Nagoya on a river that flows into Mikawa Bay. It’s known for producing such industrial and agricultural products as ceramic tile, automobile parts, mirin (Japanese rice wine for cooking), and figs.

Literally, Hekinan-shi Tetsugaku Taikenmura Mugaen’s name means “Hekinan City Philosophy-Experience Village and Selflessness Park.” A beautifully landscaped site featuring traditional Japanese buildings and a garden, teahouses, and, to one side, a modern museum building, this institution is an outgrowth of the thinking of Shōshin Itō (1876-1963), a philosopher and religious-reform activist who advocated a new approach to spiritualism rooted in Buddhism, which also embraced aspects of other philosophical or religious outlooks.

The park’s buildings house a small café, where Japanese matcha tea and traditional sweets are served, and tatami-floored rooms that are used for yoga classes, art-making workshops, and other events. On the day of my visit, a group of local residents had gathered there to learn how to carve Noh-theater masks.

The museum is a poured-concrete, contemporary structure whose jumble of rectangular and other forms is typical of a postmodernist current in Japanese architecture that enjoyed a long heyday through the decades of the 1980s and the 1990s. Inside, Miyawaki has hung more than 100 of Nishimura’s paintings and drawings on walls and, sometimes, from the ceiling. A few paintings and drawings are presented in large, built-in glass display cases. Together, they throb with the bold colors and unbridled energy that characterize Nishimura’s wildly expressionistic, sometimes psychologically intense images.

Consider, for example, the selection of simple, black-ink-on-white-paper drawings that is on display in a large glass case, along with the multi-panel painting “Kenka” (“Flower Offering”), which Nishimura created in 2015, on canvas, using acrylic paint, colored gesso, and oil pastels.

The artist employed thick, decisive lines to depict several quizzical creatures, whose faces appear to be distorted. The tension between the clarity of Nishimura’s draftsmanship and the disjointedness of his subjects’ portrayals is both captivating and a bit jarring. (In fact, the artist often exaggerates or distorts certain features when making portraits of people he knows, subjects that he imagines, or even images of his own pet cat.)

After viewing Tomoya Ise’s film, “Kaijū,” an observer encountering a painting like “Catfish Blues” can only wonder where — in what part of its dynamic composition — Nishimura set down his first strokes of paint and how he developed this energetic essay in visual oomph. In “Kaijū,” several scenes show Nishimura as he begins creating new paintings, moaning and growling in a strange way that appears both unrestrainedly animalistic and, at the same time, trance-like and deeply meditative.

In Ise’s film, his camera follows the artist’s gestures as, time and again, he lays down circles, lines, or splotches of color and begins developing a random pattern and shaping a composition marked by its own organically emerging cohesiveness or internal logic, only to destroy it by covering it with an all-eviscerating, thick coat of black paint or some other color.

One watches, at once dumbfounded and enraptured, as Nishimura’s thick paint drips down and across his canvas freely and at ease, and then again as, out of each destructive gesture, the artist coaxes all-new compositions and imagery with unmistakable integrity of their own — for as long as they might last, that is, until the painter unleashes his next wave of tear-it-all-apart experimentation.

On the day of my visit to the current exhibition, at the museum, Miyawaki told me, “Nishimura often paints over already completed paintings. It’s impossible to know for sure when or if he might decide to revisit one of his finished works, only to radically alter it or even paint over it to produce an all-new picture.”

I visited the museum on an afternoon when Takehiro Imaizumi, a young curator from the Okazaki City Museum, presented a talk about Nishimura’s art. Earlier this year, for his museum, which is located nearby in Okazaki, just to the northeast of Hekinan, Imaizumi organized the group exhibition “Hiraite, musunde” (“Opening, Binding”), which ran through June 16.

In it, he featured several Nishimura paintings from the early 2000s as well as works from more recent years. The evolution of the artist’s approach to painting was evident in the Okazaki curator’s selection, which included, among other gems, an untitled oil-on-canvas abstraction from 2002, in which broad strokes of paint as thick as cream cheese in red, white, black, and pumpkin orange swirl in a composition that is all hardy gumption and gusto.

Also on view in the current exhibition in Hekinan:

“Toppinpararinopū” (or “That Was Great,” a saying from Akita Prefecture that is used after dining), a painting from 2019 that is more than three meters tall and whose palette of red, green, and yellow and broad, fluid brush strokes depict a woman with a large face and probing eyes; “Sei ni mukau mono” (“A Thing Headed Toward Life,” 2018), a picture of a large, yellow creature whose head is topped with what looks like a rocking horse; and “Genshi to mizutama” (“Hallucination and Polks Dots,” 2022), a paint-and-collage-on-canvas work that is hanging in the rafters of the room in the main building of Hekinan-shi Tetsugaku Taikenmura Mugaen, in which tea is served.

In a caption accompanying one of two of Nishimura’s photo self-portraits that are on display in the Hekinan exhibition, the artist writes, “All people, being connected to this world, are surviving. Therefore, prayer, painting — mine or anyone else’s: It’s done in order to live. Oh, blue sea, catch my groaning voice. Catch my blues, which I’m singing at the bottom of the deep blue sea.”

[Scroll down to see more of Issei Nishmura’s artworks from the Hekinan exhibition.]