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Yoshinaga, Yutaka

Japanese, born 1948

BiographyYoshinaga was born in Nagasaki Japan in 1948 and lives in the shadow of Mount Fuji, in a small town not far from Tokyo. His work is associated with a style called Post-Mono-ha.” Mono-ha, literally “school of things;” was the name of a group that flourished in Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s which made art of raw natural or industrial materials.

Post Mono-ha respects “thingness,” while also adds the trace of the artist’s hand. Yoshinaga does not think about beauty: what concerns him is “the life of the material.” He then works on one square at a time. Like Japanese fusuma, or sliding doors, built in light wood-grids covered with paper and repaired as needed one square at a time, there are “repairs” and “handling marks” evident in his prints.

Yoshinaga thinks of “color as form” and cherishes textures and layers of pigments and stresses that his “handmade” works are about “the life of the materials” and “his relationship to those materials and to time.” It is, he says, “the accumulation of touch” and “the different feeling to things done at different times” that interests him.