2010 Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, Tokyo

Line Outside

I borrowed Sengai’s motifs of ◯△□for “The Line Outside Series,” even though, these primary shapes became the conventional vocabulary of the Modernists since Russian Suprematism and the Bauhaus Movement, eventually becoming the modernist cultural cliché.  I ventured to use them as the visual vocabulary in my work for their neutrality and simplicity, and as a paradoxical reference to the Modernist history.

I was offered a show by a museum in Israel in 1998, and created a series of works on paper, 30 inches height with a horizontal length of approximately 35 feet.  One of the works is 50 meters long comprised of 10 pieces that are each 5 meters long, which is similar to the work shown at the Pinar Gallery.  It was 36 inches high and 100 meters long in total, divided into more than 10 canvases and hung in two rows.  In 1982, I exhibited 7 paintings that were 48 inches high and 10 to 13 feet in horizontal length at the Tokyo Gallery.  In 2000, Hidenori Majima was at the University of Pennsylvania as an artist in residence from the Japanese Cultural Bureau and created some horizontally long works on paper for the ease of transportation.  Since the condition set by the Israeli museum was to reduce the shipping expense of works, this format met the requirement perfectly.  As I started to work on horizontally long paper, I was instantly drawn to the format that took me outside of the rectangular framework.  I became absorbed in a long journey on this vehicle.  Unfortunately, the show was not actualized due to the instability of the situation between Israel and Palestine.

And in the process, I discovered something unexpected and surprising.  As I wondered about my deep involvement in this format, a memory flashed in my mind.  It was a memory from as far back as I could recall, my original mindscape at the beginning of Showa Period (late 1930s) in the backyard of Narutoya, an indigo dying shop, my mother’s family home located along Machida’s main street.  There were rows after rows of indigo dyed fabric horizontally pulled between poles and stretched by shinshi, thin bamboo sticks with needle-points on both ends, to flatten the width of the fabrics.  I remember looking for my mother while running underneath these rows with hundreds of shinshi, which hung down creating reverse arches beneath the fabric.

Since 1962 when I left Japan looking for encounters with the avant-garde, I kept my focus consciously forward.  It was the first time I found myself traveling back to the beginning of the Showa Period and traditional Japan.  In this encounter I experienced, the collision of the avant-garde mindset and the original mindscape from deep within my soul, which was unknown territory, the line outside.

9/11

In 2001, I wanted to create a project to celebrate the beginning of the new century. I decided to make as many paintings as the number of the years and entitled it “The 2001 Project.”  This project began with the “Line Outside Series.”  But not long after starting the project, the world witnessed the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  2600 victims were lost in the World Trade Center in New York and it was difficult to work in the acrid air in the days that followed.  I asked myself what it meant to work everyday in the studio, and became skeptical as to what I could do to contribute to society.  Of course, there was no scheme behind the concept of “The Line Outside Series” using the very limited vocabulary to deal with 9/11, and in fact, I was not sure whether the incident should affect the direction of the work or not.

To create two-dimensional works, to make paintings, is what I have been doing since I was a child, and I continue to do so to this day as an instinctual part of myself.  However, there were three times in my life when I clearly recall not being able to paint

The first time was when I believed that my life would end short under the air raids during the second world war and the hunger in its aftermath.  This faded away as society became more stable.  The drawings I made, with the small stock of Sakura crayons purchased before the wartime shortage, received ‘unsatisfactory’ marks in elementary school, and this bothered me for a very long time.  Recently, I went back and found those drawings to take another look, and discovered that they were crying out for something with their rough touches.

The next time was the period, 1968 to 1971, when I found myself asking what it meant to be an artist under the criticism from radical student sects of the anti-establishment movement.  It was only possible to overcome through an encounter where I found the justification for making art.  Furthermore, this experience contributed thereafter to my studio work and the decision I made in how to pursue my artistic career.  That encounter was with Carl Andre, a sculptor from New York, who was invited by Yusuke Nakahara to one of the off-campus seminars during the Tama Arts University student uprising.  Ichiro Haryu asked him, “Is there a possibility for art to ever become obsolete?”  What I understood from Andre’s response was that “The studio is the place for imagination, the fountainhead of history.”

Monadology

Counting art works by number seemed to be a simple task for “The 2001 Project,” but proved to be difficult.  Counting a large canvas work and a small drawing as equally as one may conflict in comparison to the time spent on their execution.  However, in the crisis situation after 9/11 and self-imposed pressure, I proceeded by preparing 500, 19 X 24 inch panels for the practical solution of its availability and the storage of the finished works. As the project progressed, the name of the project, which started with “Line Outside Series” had to be changed, with the shifting of my interest to a newer idea.

The prepared panels, started to play a role in the development of a new concept.  As the work progressed, it became gradually apparent that the aspect of the task I needed to focus on was to create tension utilizing the limited chosen pictorial vocabulary of primary shapes.  This would give it the reason to exist as a work.  The objective itself was to create a micro-cosmos on a pictorial plane.  The next thought I had was that the cosmology of the Greek philosophers in understanding the world was in a sense their cosmic-scape paintings.  Moreover, the two dimensional micro-cosmos of the “Line Outside Series” that consisted of primary shapes could be the embodiment of Gottfried Leibniz’s (1646-1716) Monadology.  It is said that Monado is nothing but a simple substance, which enters into compounds.  Monados are the real atoms of nature or building blocks of our world.

In late 2004, the “Monado Series” was added to “The 2001 Project.”  Changing the title of the series made me realized that there was no reason to stay with Sengai’s vocabulary of the three primary shapes.  Thereafter I freed myself by choosing and inventing other simple elemental forms to continue searching for newer painterly territory.

Black Rain

In the summer of 2007, I visited the Hiroshima Memorial Museum where I read some of the U.S. Government documents displayed there about the Manhattan Project.  The following year, a Hiroshima gallery near the epicenter of the bombing invited me to have a one-person show with Hiroshima as it’s theme opening on August 6, 2009.  I began by doing research, gathering information such as photographs of Hiroshima before and after the bombing, paintings made by the victims, the Atomic Panels by the Maruki’s, even a map of Hiroshima, and I went through them many times.

By spring of 2009, I’d completed 100 panels of the “The Black Rain Series.”  And, I was asked by the Pagent : Soloveev Gallery in Philadelphia located near Independence Hall to exhibit opening on July 3rd, the night before Independence Day.  And the following October, “Black Rain II” was shown at the NY Coo Gallery in New York.  Both shows consisted of 19 by 24 inch panels to be seen as a continuum, one frame after another as if a movie reel.

Back to Serigaya

One day in 1990, I found a thick catalog in my mailbox at the University of Pennsylvania where I’d taught since 1971.  It was signed Ruth Fine.  An alumnus of The University of Pennsylvania, Ruth was two years ahead of me and at the time the curator of prints and drawings at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.  The catalog was for the opening of The Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, which she curated: “Gemini, Collaboration between Artisan and Artists.”  She had somehow placed the catalog in my mailbox after returning from Japan.  From then on, an idea of exhibiting my work at the museum grew.  I am grateful to have this exhibition here where I grew up come true, and I thank the many people who made this exhibition possible.

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the cooperation of those gave support.

Hitoshi Nakazato
February 1, 2010

Although I am not directly familiar with Hitoshi Nakazato’s upbringing, on the occasion of his first retrospective at the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts in the western region of Metropolitan Tokyo, the fact that he chased rabbits in the forests and fields as a child, and during and after World War II hunted for crabs and snails in the stream in Serigaya where the museum  now stands bears significance.  His father worked for the national railroad which as a government run enterprise was known to be a reliable organization before it was broken up and privatized by Prime Minister Nakasone [1987], and his mother’s family‘s indigo dye shop on Machida’s main street left something indelible in his mind in aspects of dyed fabrics and colors.  However, what stuck his spiritual core as an artist of expression in memory and experience can be nothing other than the Christian consciousness that touched him at Obirin Gakuen which evolved so quickly as an institution in the Machida area.

Hitoshi Nakazato graduated Obirin High School and entered Tama Art University (Tamabi) as an oil painting major.  From his desire to explore studio processes and experiment with expressions, after graduating from the University, he went to study in the U.S. as a graduate student in 1962 first at the University of Wisconsin and then at the University of Pennsylvania.  This physical shift to the U.S. can be understood through the enormous transformation that he experienced while he concentrated on printmaking.  Here is a list of some issues related to what he underwent in no particular order: 1) his dissatisfaction with the placement of internal images as strip specimen, 2) his interest in the so-called American hardedge abstraction which lead to an intense fascination in the quality of paper and color in printmaking, 3) his denial of delicate surface-treated commercially viable expression and his empathy towards the free-spirited young people who became hippies in America in their opposition against Vietnam War, 4) his doubt in the traditionally accepted norm of what were considered prints in the advent of office copiers that were becoming available, 5) his Black Rain series shown in one-person shows in New York and Philadelphia galleries last year which resulted from his visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and seeing the personal effects of the bombing and the documents related to the American Government’s Manhattan Project which relate back to his own experiences and color abstractions.

I first directly got to know Hitoshi Nakazato as a faculty colleague at Tamabi in 1968 where Yoshishige Saito, the leading figure in the Japanese avant-garde, taught and invited me to teach as a full-time professor following Yoshiaki Tono and Yusuke Nakahara; we three critics were known as the “the big three”*1.  To teach the studio classes, Saito invited an impressive group of working artists as faculty members starting with Jiro Takamatsu.  Recent graduates Nobuo Sekine, Susumu Koshimizu, Kishio Suga hung out as though they were teaching assistants, and in their complete confidence and belief of Saito’s educational philosophy inquired into their own creative concepts and dismantled aspects of decor and sentiment from their works.

In December 1968, the student protests occurred at Tamabi as they had at other universities.  I became a full-time professor that April while I served as a commissioner of the Venice Biennale.  With the other commissioners, a letter was issued to protest against the police confrontation with the people and students who rushed to the Venice Biennale after the unsuccessful “May Revolution in Paris” that ended with the re-election of President Charles de Gaulle.  Under these circumstances, I was not able to be at the University during the first semester.*2  The student uprisings in other schools such as Tokyo University and Nihon University occurred almost half a year before Tamabi so the delay seemed a bit off season.

Tamabi’s Kosei Hori and Naoyoshi Hikosaka encouraged art student peers of other universities and colleges that rather than the Zenkyoto*3 movement, reversed Immanuel Kant’s subjective aesthetics “if art can only be captured subjectively, then that is the main battleground.”  I have deeper interest in “Bikyoto.”*4  At this time, Nakazato as a full-time faculty at Tamabi intermingled with the Japanese avant-gardists that centered around Yoshishige Saito.  Nakazato had a one-person show I curated at the Aoyama Pinar Gallery where he showed his 10 large-size horizontal canvases in two tiers (100 Meter Painting).  Yusuke Nakahara as the commissioner for the Tokyo Biennale [1970] invited, among the foreign artists, Carl Andre, a former railroad worker who placed railroad ties on the floor of the exhibition space for the visitors to walk on.  This plain logic and directness became the focal view included in “Bikyoto.”

Nakazato’s return to the University of Pennsylvania in 1971 opened new possibilities for his art and life.  While keeping his studio in New York, he aimed toward the ideals of one of the founding fathers of immigrants, Benjamin Franklin.  By rooting the identity of individuals in their art work, he created a space to realize social communication by reconsidering and transforming the scope of the curriculum at the Graduate School.  In addition to the three majors of painting, sculpture, and printmaking he newly established a mixed media major, as well as clay and digital technology studios, and also hosted visiting artists, recipients of the Japanese Government Cultural Bureau’s Artists Abroad Grant and those from other countries.  He organized exhibitions within the university and incorporated notices and articles in departmental catalogs and newsletters.  This demonstrates the multidimensional possibilities of education, which Nakazato implemented.  It is no wonder that as a leader in educational transformation, he was appointed to serve as departmental chair of the University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Fine Arts in the 1990s.

Although he retired from the University in 2006, his sphere of influence could be seen in the exhibitions held in the spring and autumn of the following year on campus and in the city of Philadelphia with the works of his ex-students and visiting artists.  Nakazato continues to maintain his base in New York and Philadelphia, and in his mature years continues to be productive and provocative.

In his private life, after parting with his American wife, Nakazato remarried a professional simultaneous interpreter of independent means who was born in Japan and raised and educated in the U.S.  I have known her from the time that she taught English at the Tokyo School of Art and translated art related essays and articles.  Nakazato maintains a close and mutually cooperative relationship with his better-half.

 Ichiro Haryu

Translator’s notes:
*1 In the Tokugawa Period, the three branch houses of Tokugawa rivaled to have their sons adopted into the main Tokugawa household to become the next shogun after the death of the Tokugawa shogun without an heir.  The terminology 御三家 (gosanke), translated “the big three” was coined to describe the influential three-some Japanese critics.
*2 The academic year in Japan begins in April, so December would be in the middle of the second semester.
*3  Zenkyoto 全共闘is the abbreviation for 全学共闘会議 (zengaku kyoto kaigi) or literally university united front, a group of universities throughout Japan that formed a protest group against the establishment.
*4 Bikyoto 美共闘or literally art united front.

Translation: Sumiko Takeda / Editing: Gene Nakazato

Hitoshi Nakazato’s Triumphant Position

When describing art, we keep in mind when the work was created and to which –isms it may be ascribed.  Comprehending the work’s place in time and stylistic classification are prerequisite to understanding the work itself.  What is more important than those two, I believe, is knowing where that work was created.  Most artists of prominence have an instinctive awareness of their place, literally and physically.  The social and cultural environment under which they work affects their destiny by choice.

Hitoshi Nakazato writes, “At a glance, there are no specific descriptions of everyday life in my work.  I’d like to explain how my works reflect and responds to the life I’ve lived.  To preface this explanation, there are many things which motivate my artistic expression.”  This ability to draw from a multitude of inspirations is truly revealing. Nakazato’s scrupulous abstractions reflect nothing endemic at first sight.  To him, imagery is a universal language and in his work there is no indication of the natural surroundings where he was born and raised in Tokyo.  There is no way to grasp his experiences at his campus that witnessed uprisings that assaulted Japanese art universities, in New York where he keeps his studio, or in Philadelphia where he taught for many years.  But he insists that his work ‘reflects and responds to life.’

Then how do the universal language of imagery and the environment in which he placed himself as an individual relate.  To pursue a universal criteria, why did he leave Japan for America as the place to do his work when he did?  What meaning does his native culture, University of Pennsylvania, and New York hold for this artist?

Simply stated, expatriating himself creates a multi-dimensional layering of cultures.  This is the decisive foundation of Hitoshi Nakazato’s universe.  This is not by any means a paradox.  Expatriotism is not a disassociation from the past, but instead means unavoidably encountering differing cultures.  Nakazato‘s critical perspective of the two cultures guide him to a new language that is neither eclectic nor accumulative, but raises possibilities for expressions which only this artist is capable of doing.

A specific example is a series entitled “Line Outside.”  In the first half the 1960s when Nakazato first went to the U.S., New York Abstract Expressionism was beginning to wane and its formalistic painterly space came into question, a time when Pop Art and Minimalism were just emerging.  Nakazato found a way to respond to his sensibility in the straightforward colors and configurations of Color Field Painting, which were in a wide sense influenced by Minimalism.

The “Less is More” concept of the times ultimately arrived as huge single color fields, but to Nakazato “less” alone did not fit his ticket.  As an artist who also emphasizes the importance of drawing, Nakazato saw the concept of “less” as a means to explore the possibilities of the line.  At times, geometric straight lines that have the nuance of hand-drawn lines are placed on the color surface of the canvas.  And what is to be noted is the same simplicity recaptured, not with inorganic hardness, with the soft commonality of Japanese and Asian qualities.

Started in the latter half of the 1980s, the “Line Outside” series unmistakably demonstrates his multi-layering of cultures.  While trying to go ‘outside’ the notion of lines as defined in Western paintings such as dividing lines, contour lines, and independent lines, Nakazato explored other possibilities while not denying the line itself, eventually on his own accord he came across upon Sengai’s Zen painting.  The onomatopoeia of Chinese characters, Line Outside = Sengai (線外＝仙崖), while looking outside the line of Western and American Modernism, Sengai of his homeland was revealed. This bears the humor of his critical insight and provides a view of the humanism (人文) (in other words, another pun: literary man style tradition: 文人) that lurks behind.

To the witty picture of only ◯△□ painted by the Zen monk in the latter part of the Edo Period, Nakazato rediscovered in his American environment the Modernist visual language of his own native culture that came far before Suprematism, Minimalism, and Conceptualism.  Yet to call that Modernism is post facto, and where he finds himself is the common ground of multi-dimensional cultures and his investigation of the line is its position within a larger horizon.  In actuality, the ◯△□ that appears on his paintings are unlike the dryness of Sol Lewitt and Kenneth Noland, conceived with a delectable touch of humanism.  This softness in not only evident in the lines but can be noted in his sense of color as a refined colorist.

 The other position that is unique to Nakazato is that he constantly paints and makes prints in parallel.  Parallels are essence echoes of each other. As his linguistic duality similarly relate, “by expressing in one language, and confirm with the other,” the creation of the prints and painting mutually critique and respond to the other.  The directness of the paint brush with its subjectivity and immediacy, contrast with the indirectness of the rollers via the intermediary plate with objectivity and systematic process, providing the fecundity of their coexistence in his two dimensional plane.

Hitoshi Nakazato’s triumphant position: viewers of this retrospective exhibition will certainly find themselves impressed by this discerning and vivacious world.

Akira Tatehata
Translation: Sumiko Takeda / Editor: Gene Nakazato

I Got to Know Hitoshi

I first got to know Hitoshi Nakazato in 1994 in the midst of the final critiques for the fine arts graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania.  These critiques were and are grueling affairs for all concerned; three consecutive eight hour days of very public dissections of the work of every student in the program by a panel of professors, visiting artists, writers and curators. One by one each student in sets up a semester’s worth of art in front of the critics and all the other students, then stands back and listens for half an hour to the faculty debate the merits of their production.  Very few students emerge unscathed, and that first weekend more than one young artist was reduced to tears.  It’s almost as traumatic an experience for the younger faculty. Each speech is a perilous venture into the unknown, as critics’ comments are analyzed as skeptically as the critiqued work.  I was doubly impressed, therefore, by the stabilizing presence of Hitoshi in the midst of this fraught environment. Gracious, intuitive, generous and utterly original in his comments, Hitoshi was a consistent source of light and calm in a roiling environment.  I have learned more from my experience teaching alongside Hitoshi and his colleagues than I did in all my years as a student.

I continued to be impressed by Hitoshi as a teacher and a colleague over the years that followed. Steady and determined, he pursued his vocation as a teacher with an unwavering faith in his own values and an unshakable commitment to the students’ needs.  It was Hitoshi’s decency that struck me first about the man, but that quality turned out to be a relevant introduction to the work of the artist.  If rigorous abstraction have an ethical dimension, then Hitoshi’s work is profoundly ethical both in content and in practice. His innovations as a printmaker gave form to his contributions as a teacher and his remarkable work ethic in the studio made him an inspiring and demanding role model for generations of adoring students.  I am struck by the words of his student John D. Woolsey, who studied with Hitoshi in the early 1970’s, “(studio practice) became almost a Zen meditation: the feel and heft of properly soaked paper, the right heat of an etching plate before wiping it, the silky feel of properly wiped in. ‘You haven’t wiped your plate right’ we would hear from 20 feet away. ‘How do you know?’ we would respond. “I can hear.”

Each time I visit Hitoshi’s studio I am reminded all over again what it means to be an artist in the most fundamental and imposing sense of the word.  His commitment to craft certainly provides one dimension of this personification, but more profoundly, Hitoshi’s artistry lies in the inextricable connection between his craft and his larger moral vision, and his example of a life fully dedicated to the uncompromised pursuit of a vision of beauty.  His huge work studio is bisected diagonally by an extraordinarily long worktable.  Stacks of canvases are intricately arranged on shelves and rolling carts placed all around the room.  File drawers and boxes are filled to the brim with cardboard folders, each in turn stuffed fat with prints and drawings and paintings interwoven between glassine sheets.  To sit in Hitoshi’s studio and pour through the rich and bountiful effluvia of his restless imagination and a tireless hand is to meet with the evidence of a career spent erasing the boundaries between thought and action, work and being.

I am fascinated by the elegant circuitry of Hitoshi’s creative imagination. One sharp reductive image leads to another, which leads to another, then another, then another.  Sometimes the interposing logic is obvious; sometimes it springs to view only after the artist casually provides a hint or two.  A square leads to a circle, leads to a triangle. A rectangle perches on a square, stands before a rectangle. A red form repeats itself in yellow, black, and green. A series of crescent forms climb a vertical line on one sheet, then in the next iteration suddenly flip and become a horizontal dangle of vegetal pods.  In no other artist’s work do I see the logic and potential of the print process play out as rationally yet as imaginatively, bountifully, and exuberantly as it does in Hitoshi’s prints. Experimentation and fecundity are raised in his practice to the level of an esthetic philosophy.  No form resides as the final word, and no image can be considered in isolation; each inspires speculation about the next contingent manifestation.  Looking through Hitoshi’s print series I always find myself silently picking out a favorite or two and imagining the pleasure I would derive from having the opportunity to contemplate them on their own.  More precisely, I try to imagine the effect of a single print of Hitoshi’s on a hypothetical viewer who, encountering the work without foreknowledge of all its cousins, could accept it as the preferred distillation of the artist’s vision.  I imagine that print would be utterly satisfying to its observer.  Each one of Hitoshi’s pieces is fully capable of leading an independent existence.  Each one is a complete and self-sufficient statement.  But that is not how I choose to think of them.  I see them all, the prints, the drawings, the paintings, the studio, the shelves and the boxes and crates and rolls of work; the thousands of painting and print and drawings as inseparable form the man himself, the entire inventory a massive masterwork, a contemplative explosion of creativity. For an outsider, this is evidence in the work of a sensibility that emphasizes experience and enlightenment over theoretical knowledge seems manifestly Zen-like, as he superficially understands the concept, but this insight into Hitoshi’s working process inspires a paradoxical ambivalence. While it is exciting and gratifying to perceive an overarching philosophical spine to the work, the danger of naively exoticizing an American artist on the basis of his heritage is obvious, especially given the west’s history of cultural appropriation so aggressive it borders on imperialism.  I suspect that for Hitoshi himself such external influences, as they would be for any good artist and craftsman, are at most unconscious influences in the studio.  The body, trained by 10,000 hours of preparation, moves on its own.

The subtly playful curiosity that characterizes Hitoshi’s prints, drawings and paintings is also the mark of a born contrarian; his body of work, while paying homage to the past, also seems in endless debate with it.  Hitoshi’s vocabulary of geometric and organic lines ultimately form a personal signature, merging his particular identity with his practice of experimentation.  It is an elegant slight of hand: these complex and formal works serve as well as a massive self-portrait of the artist, created across time and space.

This continual oscillation between identity and form began early.  Hitoshi explained to me how he was struck as a child by the symmetry of the Chinese characters that compose his name-a symmetry that made his name stand out in the posted class rankings and so marked him for special distinction if he rose to the top of the class, but also special humiliation if he sank towards the bottom, as also, inevitably, sometimes occurred.  Perhaps that fascination with abstract line and textual meaning helped draw him to the work of the Zen master monk -artists of the past, especially the Renzai practitioner Sengai, whose elegant, witty and visionary drawings from the eighteenth century anticipate the achievements of contemporary movements in abstract and conceptual art by fully 100 years. Sengai’s depictions of iconic triangles, squares and circles were drawn long before the Russian Constructivists, Bauhaus designers and post modern recyclers threatened to turn such forms into trivialities.  Hitoshi has deconstructed this master of the odd confluence of the distant and the profound, the modern and the ironic, and internalized him into his identity and his practice.  A homonym for Sengai, which translates to “Monk on a Cliff”, is “Line Outside” a term and a position Hitoshi takes into his own practice.  For such a master as Sengai, the notion of separating life from philosophy, from work, was unthinkable.  And so it is for Hitoshi.

Hitoshi notes, in the essay he prepared for this catalog, that there were only three times in his long and productive life when he found it difficult to produce art.  His first crisis came as a young boy in the waning days of World War Two and in its immediate aftermath, when life itself, much less art, seemed not to be a reliable commodity.  A second came thirty years later, when as a teacher in Japan caught in the vortex of the political convulsions of the 1960’s, he was forced to swear to adhere to absurd esthetic choices in the name of abstract political causes. Art seemed a weak gesture in the face of such consuming anger.  Finally came the World Trade Tower attacks, within eyesight and drifting winds of the artist’s studio.  Ironically Hitoshi was then the midst of a typically atypical project-he was attempting to produce 2001 paintings in 2001- when this brutal attack on culture and civilization as he knew it derailed him.  Again, briefly, making art was a hard choice for an artist for whom art was not a choice at all.

Hitoshi Nakazato built a prolific career in enlightened domains, but he has also seen first hand the fragility of such privileged systems. The final balance though tilts toward life, for his life and body of work embodies the peculiar world-creating beauty that animates our spirits and flows from our hearts into the world through the work of our hands.

Matt Freedman artist, writer, performing artist, visiting artist, University of Pennsylvania, School of Design