What I am working on is not the so-called abstraction, but a desire for the primitive root. [...] The board I paint can
    be seen as something else other than a painting or a work. And I don’ t wish to have it [be called so]. It is merely
    the process of me trying to strive for something that would appear.

Above are words of Yamaguchi Takeo, a pioneering abstractionist in Japan. Widely exhibited in postwar international art festivals, such as the São Paulo Biennial, Yamaguchi is highly praised around the world. He was famously against authority and opposed the idea of being addressed as an artist, thus he never signed his paintings, which he considered “not properly done.” Throughout his life, Yamaguchi had set himself free from the established knowledge and conventional thinking, so as to concentrate on the making of pure forms.

Yamaguchi was born in Seoul in 1902 as the eldest son of a successful enterpriser from Kagoshima. Apart from the ten years he stayed in Tokyo and in France for his study of art, until the end of the war in 1946 when he moved back to Japan with his family, he had spent most of his childhood and young adult years in the vast land surrounded by nature in Seoul. The continental natural features have had a significant impact on him: “Born and raised at the edge of the continent, I am everlastingly influenced by its natural features. [...] The weight of [my] colors and texture all trace to these natural features inherited [in me] ”. Thus, the distinctive colors of Venetian red and yellow ocher that Yamaguchi painted with exclusively after the war are the artist’s “colors of personality” grown from the continental wild nature.

In 1952, three years before the present work was painted, Togo Seiji gave Yamaguchi plywood boards, which had inspired Yamaguchi to work on large-scaled plywood boards from then on. Since 1953, his palette was gradually limited to the dark-and-light combinations of two colors, forms in yellow ocher or Venetian red on black or Persian blue backgrounds. In 1954, Yamaguchi’s work Katachi (form) was awarded the grand prize at the first Gendai nihon bijutsu ten (Contemporary Japanese art exhibition). The year 1955 was an active one for Yamaguchi: his works were included in a number of important exhibitions at national and public museums; and he was selected to exhibit at the third São Paulo Biennial to represent Japan.

The present work, Kukan (space), is composed of a circle and a rhythmically curved form in Venetian red on black background. Forms such as circle, ellipse and other irregular forms are frequently painted by Yamaguchi from the late 1940s to 1954. He shifted his composition to either circle and straight lines or grid-like forms in different colors from the year of 1955. Therefore, the present work, together with the São Paulo Biennial exhibited Red Line and Yellow Forms, belongs to the last works of Yamaguchi’s composition of circle and irregular forms.

On the titles of his works, Yamaguchi noted: “Even though it is a fixed term consisting of two characters, they are characters in relation to the [term’s meaning] [...] Therefore, I used my imagination to understand the true condition of the meanings of the characters.” Taking these words into consideration, the present work, Kukan (space), signicantly represents Yamaguchi’s own interpretation of the true meanings of the term “kukan.”

Yamaguchi Takeo (yoga painter; 1902−1983)
Born in Seoul. Graduated from the Tokyo Fine Art School. Co-founded Joto-kai with Ushijima Noriyuki and Okada Kenzo. Later traveled to France and was influenced by the artists Saeki Yuzo and Ossip Zadkine. Exhibited abstract paintings at the Nika-kai upon his return to Japan. Later established Kyushitsu-kai with Togo Seiji and Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita as the consultants. Active exhibiting both in and out of Japan. Received the Ministry of Education Award for Fine Arts in 1962. Appointed a professor at Musashino Art University.