Yoshishige Saito at the Yokohama Museum of Art - art exhibition; Yokohama; Japan

Art in America, July, 1993 by Janet Koplos

For Japanese artists, Yoshishige Saito is an honored mentor, an exemplar of creative drive, a living link to early 20th-century abstraction. He is celebrated as the teacher who influenced, through his work and his independent thinking, the artists of the important Mono-ha movement 25 years ago [see A.i.A., Apr. '90]. Fifteen years before that he was winning painting prizes on the international biennial circuit. And 15 years before that he was making avant-garde constructions that got him into trouble with his rule-conscious peers (who resented being unable to pigeonhole his work as painting or sculpture) and also with the repressive military authorities of the time (who suspected him of subversion). As a teenager, Saito had been inspired by a Russian Futurist who visited Japan; as a young man he wrote novels and made art that resisted the then-dominant Surrealism.

Saito is 89 now and still working. The Yokohama Museum show was not simply a retrospective: he designed the installation, so the exhibition itself was his most recent work. Unfortunately, Kenzo Tange's intrusive and inflexible museum design impeded his effort. The first work seen, for example, was one of Saito's spatial assemblies in which pieces of black-painted lumber lean together or interpenetrate to make a no-beginning, no-end visual thicket. The work seemed splintered against the distracting tiers and colonades of Tange's football-field-meets-cloister lobby.

The presentation in the neutral (if still unalterable) Exhibition Room 4 was more successful. Saito made a huge installation of dozens of new and old works of painted lumber dating from the early '80s to the present. The gallery was lit only on the walls. The shadowy middle was intermittently split by a row of these assemblies while others lined the walls. Most consisted of diagonal boards; there were a few square plaques or boxes or wheels but almost no true verticals or horizontals. Fitful continuity, dynamic balance and empty centers typify these sculptures--and the installation as a whole. A viewer often looked through one work at another, and it wasn't always easy to say where one ended and the next began. That suits Saito's preference for the provisional and the irregular. These, his most important and most philosophical works, demonstrate an Asian belief in the infinite creative potential of the void. They physically point outward; every part leads to another in cyclic dynamism.

The perimeter lighting in Room 4 created a bright-and-dim layering of space. A more compact and tangible layering was repeatedly seen in the earlier works shown in the other galleries. There were wood reliefs from the 70s and lead reliefs from the 80s, both often consisting of a simple shape cut from a square, lifted out and laid askew across the gap resulting from its removal. There were also wall reliefs that look like freight pallets gone wrong--a wooden frame with boards woozily woven in and out so that there is, in a sense, no fixed surface.

Ambiguity of surface is, in fact, one of Saito's constants. It can be noted in the early '60s works in which he applied paint to an expanse of plywood and then drew upon the surface with an electric drill. In Work (White) from 1963 there's a kind of tictac-toe pattern, with patches of script that are more physical and less random in feeling than Twombly's and dense scribbles that look as if some notation has been obliterated; often the scratches reveal underpainting, a history. A related red work from 1961 includes a bravura broad stroke of red paint at lower left, bunches of dots impressed into the surface at top, areas that look as if skin has leprously fallen away, and miasmic blue puffs like emanations of swamp gas.

These two paintings were the earliest original pieces in the show. All of Saito's prewar works were destroyed by bombs and fires. In 1973 he remade many of them from memory and from photographs (along with a few lost works from the early 50s that were, inexplicably, the only '50s pieces included in this exhibition). Examples from the 1938-39 "Toro-wood" series of painted wooden cutouts of simple, fat graphic shapes look so succinct and contemporary, like solidified punk graffiti, that it's hard to believe their original dates. To examine Saito's varied oeuvre is to see the origins of the work of many of Japan's best contemporary artists.