Today was Nagawachuu, strangely no tragedies. Only one period which was mostly spent hovering protectively over one of the boys (he probably thought I was smothering him, but I was just trying to keep the other teacher away while gently prodding him towards the answers since he was having a hell of a time of it). All the kids are readying for the festival and it looks exciting. I wonder if American schools have a festival. Honestly I don't remember. Maybe a science fair?
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Saturday the 12th I went with the Suzukis to an art gallery in Sapporo commemorating art students killed in World War II. Afterwards we shopped and shared English again, and it was a full and exciting day. I want to keep record most of all of the gallery itself- ”祈りの絵".
The median age of death of the artists was 24 years old, by combat or disease. Early on in the exhibit I was approached by an extremely polite, earnest older woman and asked what I thought of this gallery as a foreigner. I answered that I wanted to know more about what these artists thoughts and dreams had been, who they were as people. It was a clumsy answer but she seemed satisfied. It was a very emotional thing. I commented on the large, dark and intimate self portrait of a young man we were looking at, that the person who painted it had a deep way of seeing himself, and she seemed happy, urged me to slowly take the place in. I heard that woman thanked Mrs. Suzuki when she left the gallery. Other people there had tissues to their eyes while they looked on at letters left behind for families under the glass, paint sets warped and burned and withered with age.
My initial thoughts of the place were primarily aesthetic- interest in the styles pursued by different artists. I haven't been to many joint gallery showings, so the jump in purpose from one painting to the next fascinated me. Why did those two separate artists paint different self portraits but use the same unusually dark brown and yellow color scheme, while another artist used soft, broad and pastel colors to generally discribe a landscape rather than define shapes in detail? I looked in wonder at how completely the "Japanese asthetic" was absent in most pieces, finding instead western techniques pursued and even mastered. One large piece was clearly inspired by french artists of the time in style and composition. Even forty years ago Japan was absorbing the west without a second thought, taking it for itself with incredible efficiency and fluency.
A child of computer generated art, the brush strokes really stood out to me. The solidity of them, the permanence, and yet an intimate understanding of how it must have felt to put that paint on the canvas or wood or paper stroke by stroke, pushing it to blend it out of sight or to create some feeling of air or energy moving through the piece. It was looking at the brushstrokes that got to me and I teared up. A stray hair from the brush still trapped eternally in the paint. Evidence that the images were put together stroke by stroke by those young hands, hands that had held the brush or pencil for countless hours, endlessly pursuing a future, becoming more skilled one day at a time (at the age of 20, I have lived for roughly 7, 324 days, give or take leap years).
And then I understood the tragedy that is not just Japan's, not just America's, not any one place's, but the tragedy the entire world must bear- that those hands have long since faded out of existence; all of the success and failure and beauty and potential of what they could have wrought, how it may have changed history; stopped, neatly and completely. All of those timelines ended at 24. Those artists each had their own view of the world, humanity, and themselves, each had their own motivation and message to share- from the straightforward desire to produce quality art to a need to capture a place or person, an emotion, a dream; to honor a parent, to give shape to abstract ideas like country; even their failures as amber trapping an insect, preserving a fragment of history for we in the future, allowing us to glimpse the small and intimate details of another world, strangely familar and alien all at once.
Each was an irreplaceable, chaotically complex life, left for all of eternity incomplete. I wonder for what purpose.
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