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

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, from one side his work and his independent thinking, the artists of the important Mono-ha motion 25 years ago [see A.i.A., Apr. '90] Fifteen years before that he was winning painting prizes upon the international biennial circuit. And 15 years before that he was making avant-garde constructions that got him into disturb with his rule-conscious peers (who be offended ated 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 the agency of 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 display was not simply a retrospective: he designed the installation, in the way that the exhibition itself was his greatest in quantity recent work. Unfortunately, Kenzo Tange's intrusive and inflexible museum design impeded his effort. The first work seen for example, was single 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 appear to beed splintered against the distracting tiers and colonades of Tange's football-field-meets-cloister lobby

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

The perimeter lighting in compass 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 grove reliefs from the 70s and lead reliefs from the 80 one as well as the other often consisting of a simple shape chop from a square, lifted without and laid askew across the gap resulting from its removal. There were also wall reliefs that gaze like freight pallets gone wrong--a made of wood frame with boards woozily woven in and on the outside so that there is, in a faculty of perception no fixed surface.

Ambiguity of surface is, in fact, single of Saito's constants. It can be noted in the early '60 works in which he applied paint to an expanse of plywood and then drew on 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 les random in feeling than Twombly's and compact scribbles that look as if more [i]or[/i] less notation has been obliterated; repeatedly the scratches reveal underpainting, a history. A related r work from 1961 includes a bravura broad pat of red paint at lower left bunches of dots impressed into the surface at top, areas that gaze as if skin has leprously fallen away, and miasmic sapphirine puffs like emanations of swamp gas.

These sum of two units paintings were the earliest original pieces in the exhibit All of Saito's prewar works were ruined by bombs and fires. In 1973 he remade many of them from memory and from photographs (along with a not many lost works from the early 50 that were, inexplicably, the alone '50s pieces included in this exhibition). Examples from the 1938-39 "Toro-wood" series of painted made of wood cutouts of simple, fat graphic shapes direct the eye so succinct and contemporary, like solidified prostitute graffiti, that it's hard to believe their original dates. To examine Saito's varied oeuvre is to diocese the origins of the work of many of Japan's best contemporary artists.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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