Etsu Egami

Early this year (2023), Etsu Egami chose the opening lines in the early Kamakura literary work Hōjōki (方丈記, "My Ten-Foot Hut"）written by Kamono Chomei (1153-1216) as her exhibition title in the newly opened 1,500 sq meter Whitestone Gallery in Singapore during the Singapore Art Week 2023 (6 - 15 Jan). The title was long: Incessant is the change of water where the stream glides on calmly: the spray appears over a cataract, yet vanishes without a moment's delay.[1] 

Egami cited the lines for the constant in human spirit and wisdom -- that the water flows endlessly -- amidst the recurring physical and social calamities and destructions. The lines were the reflections of a hermit from within a hut of a mere ten-foot rectangular. I read that metaphor of a physically constrained and yet reflexively boundless space as the very space in Egami's paintings. Each painting says of something, as the curators, commentators, and sometimes even the artist herself, have noted, articulated, and elaborated on ideas, themes, circumstances, and cross-cultural experiences a work or a series conveys. On the other hand, any attempt to experience the works thematically, I was reflecting as I marveled at the works in the exhibition, would have been a constraint to get to the fuller experience of the encounter with the paintings.

I later realized the irony between the text and the hut in Kamono Chomei's literature – that to get to the point of the hermit's reflections it had to be the text as ideas, the hut as format, and the encounter with literature as going way beyond these frames. Etsu Egami would later in the course of our conversations speak of the problem of frames or categories: "Calligraphy is more like classical music; it comprises 'typologies'; but if you look at it from the perspective of contemporary music, then classical music as a frame exists only because of a classificatory system."[2] 

I was curious as to what were the starting points of the pictorial or painterly expressions created by Etsu Egami. While they were Egami's reflections about her own cultural encounters, personal situations, and thoughts, there could have been a "constant" that layered or integrated these planes. I wanted to know if it was calligraphy and explored the issue of calligraphy with the artist.

Our conversations led to this short paper for Egami's new exhibition to be held at the HOW Art Museum, Shanghai, opening on 9 Jun 2023. It is not clear to me if the title of the exhibition at the HOW Art Museum has been decided at the point of writing this essay. One senses resistance on the part of the artist to have an exhibition title as in the common art world practice, as seen in the very long title of her exhibition in Singapore that required much effort to remember, let alone decipher. But you will find all the answers in her paintings.

From Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly (1907), James Hilton's Lost Horizon (1933), to the myriad forms of Orientalist imagination in Western cultural products prompt a strong sense of resistance in Egami, particularly to the stereotypical image of the conforming Japanese woman. Like in the multiple tiers in the starting lines in Hōjōki, the layering of Orientalisms is not just a phenomenon in the West, but also self-, relative-, and situated-orientalizing within Asia, which are all part and parcel of Etsu Egami's reflections and expressions; This much I know about the exhibition, far as the theme or title is concerned. "The rest is history," as it is often said of the complexities and multiplicities that would unfold beyond the initial line, as the histories are all inscribed in the paintings to be shown.

The artist's usual human faces and figures, in myriad forms of expression and interaction, are drenched in brushes, layers, and lines, or being and becoming form as the vivid colors and even voids in between take shape. An academic in her own right with a doctorate degree from the Central Academy of Art, Beijing, Etsu Egami's reflections on forms of Orientalism both theoretically and aesthetically bring her to consider even images in Hong Kong martial arts movies popular in Japan in the 2000s (that the artist grew up with), the inevitable comparison of the Tutankhamun mask, Sanxingdui figures, and the "aliens" in popular culture. All these imagery, imagination, symbol, and signals are interwoven into the artist's paintings which are more than a dissertation on cultural studies but are the very lived experience of participatory and reflexive engagement in the said cultural contexts all at the same time.

What about calligraphy? Etsu Egami is fortunate to have an artist father (JY) who taught her calligraphy in unconventional and highly inspiring ways. To my many questions about the phonetics and ideographs in Japanese calligraphy, the differences in calligraphic renditions in hiragana, katakana, and kanji, relations between semantics and forms, and so on, Egami's immediate response was that calligraphy, first and foremost, was about its experience as a bodily extension.

"I remember it was calligraphy – not writing – that my father taught me. This was so as to let me feel my bodily sensation in the rubbing of the brush tip on the paper. It was like a game; It was fun," recalled Egami.[3] The artist also played the piano and erhu and paralleled the suppleness of strings on the musical instruments with the hair forming the tip of the brush. "Hence rather than saying the brush is a medium, it is better to say that it is an extension of one's body,"[4] Egami explicated in a way that surpassed my questions on philology and semantics. This was when I realized that what calligraphy meant to Egami, thanks to her father's pedagogy, amounted to an art-inspired epistemology. The many discussions in the art world about form and content, ideas and pictorials, and text and calligraphy were already seamlessly integrated in Egami's world of knowledge and expression at a young age.

Etsu Egami's calligraphy and ink painting works created when she was 9 years old

Integration is always dynamic. It encompasses tensions. This was also realized thanks to calligraphy, as Egami has it:

The brush is elastic, and so is the felt under the paper. When I was learning to write, the strength in my hands and the ideas in my heart were often (mutually) absorbed and resisted, and as a result this condition could not be directly echoed on the paper. Herein was a dialogue between the hand and the brush; how to spread out, how to draw back so as to let the ink flow effortlessly, or strenuously.

This kind of dialogue and adjustment at any time forms a strong sense of rhythm, which is full of vitality like breathing. I really like spirit consonance, one of Xie He's Six Principles (6th cen CE). The rhythm of the lines archives the calligrapher's movement as well as her breathing. I often feel that when I use a brush, I seem to be sculpting something, and gradually this process draws you into another dimension of space.[5]

Like painting, calligraphy has stylistic categories too. In shodō 書道, the kana and kanji artists belong to different genres, just as the intensity of cursiveness comes in different degrees –  seigyo, gyo, and gyoso. I can imagine how such categorization would have been awkward, if not contrived, to a young Egami as she had already noted the dō, or the Way of calligraphy, just as the artist had not answered my question about the division between semantics and forms, and meaning and image.

"My father always told me to write and to feel with one's whole body. The brush is like a bodily organ; it has sentience. Every stroke, every line is fresh, like breathing, continuous and rhythmic, and has meaning. It is concurrently visual and auditory language," added Egami.[6] While the Chinese aesthetic dictum always spoke of calligraphy and painting as deriving from the same source (书画同源), for Egami this was a lived experience that "since childhood, I have done calligraphy and painting both at the same time; as I grew up in many countries, I did not conform to the norm in calligraphy."[7]

Quite apart from the integration (with tensions, as Egami reminded above) of form and meaning in the artist's work, there is also an art historical dimension to Etsu Egami's world of knowledge (as in the conjunction of theories of Orientalisms and lived experiences). The artist is often regarded as a "third generation" Post-War Japanese artist. The first Post-War generation tended to represent austere topics or Oriental philosophy such as Gutai and Monoha. The second generation featured symbolisms of Japanese popular- and sub-cultures such as Manga and Otaku. The current generation, with which Egami affiliates, is free of the weight of history and cultural representation, is global in outlook and is concerned about issues pertaining to humanity in general. This generation is also acutely concerned about diversity and inclusivity, such as women and other minority groups.[8] Egami has a delicate line on the rainbow: "Every color of the rainbow is very beautiful, they do not merge, they form parallel lines, they coexist; the rainbow has gradually become my painting language."[9]

It is interesting that Egami returned to painting after engaging in installation and multimedia works. From another perspective, the art historical trajectory above could also be read as a return to the origin of calligraphy, the kanji form, in particular, as East Asian cultural specific. Yet its universality in terms of the integration of knowledge, expression, words, and forms is given new manifestation in Etsu Egami's works, as she rejects traditional internal categorization of Asian artistic forms such as the genres within calligraphy. Egami refers to Deconstruction: "Episte, memory, and information are 'dissolved' as they are 'gathered' in (an endless process of) 'deconstructing' and 'constructing'. They are in perpetual flux. New knowledge triggers new painting language, and the images of painting make knowledge clearer and deeper."[10] Calligraphy from its outset had already contained the inspiration and potentials of deconstructive impulse.

[1] See Tan Siuli, Etsu Egami: Oscillating Between the Abstract and Figurative, https://www.whitestone-gallery.com/blogs/articles-post/etsu-egami-essay-by-tan-siuli

[2] Etsu Egami's original line: 书法更像古典音乐，它有"型"，但是如果你站在当代音乐的角度去看，那么古典音乐也是一种框架，其实这些框架都是你自己赋予给自己的。Exchanges with Etsu Egami, meeting in Singapore on 13 Jan 2023, and subsequent correspondence particularly during the period 22 May to 1 Jun 2023 (between Beijing, Tokyo, Saint-Savin, and Donostia-San Sebastian). All direct quotes in this article have the same reference.

[3] Etsu Egami's original line: 我记得小时候父亲就教我书法，不是教我写字，而是让我用身体来感受笔锋在纸上的摩擦，像做游戏，挺好玩的. Ïbid.

[4] Etsu Egami's original line: 与其说毛笔是一个媒介，还不如说是自己身体的延伸. Ibid.

[5] Etsu Egami's original line: 毛笔是有弹性的，纸张下的毛毡也是有弹性的。学字时，手上的力量和心中的意念常常被吸收，被反抗，不能直接反映在纸上。这里需要手和毛笔对话，如何让笔锋铺开，又如何让笔锋收拢，如何让墨流顺畅，又如何让墨流苦涩。这种对话和随时调节，形成了强烈的节奏感，像呼吸一样，充满了生命活力。我很喜欢谢赫<六法>中的气韵生动。线条的韵律记录了作者的运动，也记录了作者的呼吸。我常常觉得，用毛笔的时候我好像是在雕刻某一种东西，层层渐进带你进入另一个空间维度。Ibid.

[6]  Etsu Egami's original line:  我父亲总是说要用全身去写，全身去感受。这里的全是已经包含了毛笔，毛笔就像身上的一个器官，是有知觉的。每一笔，每一个线条都是鲜活的，像呼吸一样，连续而有节奏，都有意义所在。是视觉语言，又是听觉语言。 Ibid.

[7]  Etsu Egami's original line: 对我来说没有，从小我都是同时进行的，书画一体，我在很多国家长大所以书法并不是一种规范内的存在。Ibid.

[8] Asia Society Japan, The Potential of the Third Generation of Postwar Contemporary Artists in Japan (Recap), Art for Breakfast 2021 (Talk by Etsu Egami),

https://asiasociety.org/japan/potential-third-generation-postwar-contemporary-artists-japan-recap

[9] Etsu Egami's original line: 彩虹每一个颜色都很美丽，不融合，平行线，共存着，彩虹渐渐的成为了我的绘画语言。Ibid.

[10]  Etsu Egami's original line:  认知，记忆，信息在"聚集"的同时"解散"，在"构成"的同时"解构"，甚至没有结构，也没有构成，是一种动态，一期一会，流动的... "变异"就是真相。新的认知触发新的绘画语言，绘画的形象表现又让认知变得更加清晰和深入。Ibid.