Variations on the Japanese garden. Alicia Chillida

The exhibition proposes a journey through works from different periods, continents and disciplines based on the theory of the "Eternal modern" by Japanese landscape painter, calligrapher, tea master, ikebana master and theorist Mirei Shigemori (1896-1975).

The project has its origins in the contemplation of the Zen garden of Ryoan-ji, Kyoto. It adopts the term variations for its musical structure to propose a dialogue between very disparate artists and explore the repositioning of the arts from 1960 onwards, in a discontinuous narrative that invokes different times and spaces from East to West, from the 19th century to the present day.

Variations on the Japanese garden presents a free composition, a dialogue between authors from different periods, cultures and disciplines based on the figure of Mirei Shigemori (1896-1975), creator of gardens, painter, tea and ikebana master, who defends the concept of the "garden" and the "ikebana". "Eternal Modern". "The technique I used created a contemporary garden, my main objective was to achieve a timeless modernity.". Obsessed with modernizing the garden in Japan after the Meiji renovation, Shigemori imbibed European art, philosophy and religions.

His notion of micro-macro cosmos reflects the coexistence of the garden and the observer as a unique and indissoluble work of art and points to the artistic function of the mirror-garden as a place of contemplation and self-knowledge.

Shigemori exemplifies the central artistic conquest of his time. His theory derives from the "Primitive Moderns" who seek energy in the Japanese prehistoric periods, Jomon (c. 10,000-300 B.C.) and Yayoi (c. 300-300 A.D.). The aim is to break with the lyrical naturalism and refined elegance of the Japanese past and to recover the essential primitive force, to radicalize its practice and to transcend the clichés of Western dynamism and Asian statism, as well as the dichotomy between Japanese tradition and Western modernity. In this way, the project attempts to correspond to Shigemori's gesture of bringing together voices from East and West, starting from the spatio-temporal quality of the Japanese garden.

Dichotomies between micro and macro, intimacy-nature, language or contemplation, music and silence, beauty-violence, primitivism-refinement and themes such as the ephemeral, the analogical or the unfathomable emerge from this open dialogue that attempts to reveal a fissure between the signs of the East and the West.

The selection of works ranges from the 19th century to the present day, from Japanese printmaking / ukiyo-eThe exhibition includes works by Toyohara Chikanobu, Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Richard Serra, Cildo Meireles, James Lee Byars, Nam June Paik, Yukio Nakagawa, David Hammons, Mirei Shigemori, John Cage, Antoni Tàpies, Juan Hidalgo, Víctor Grippo, Yoko Ono, Àngels Ribé, Iwana and Walter de Maria.

The West discovers in the East, in Japan, a spiritual energy in which it glimpses a non-dialectical way of thinking, which impels it to review in depth the meaning of gesture in space. Contemporary art, which gained momentum with the rupture of Dada, encounters Zen Buddhism in its search for the emptying of the self. The poet Shinkichi Takahashi writes "DADA affirms everything and denies everything / DADA finds the self in everything / Everything is unique; Buddha resignation / Finds everything in everything...."(Atsuko Tanake) (Atsuko Tanake) (...)

This exhibition was born in the space of a small handmade book, emaki -a unique copy, published in collaboration with Casa Asia in 2010.

When the book becomes an exhibition, it confirms its experimental tone and adopts the term variations for its structure. Through very disparate artists, it explores the repositioning of the arts since the 1960s, in which experimental and collective activity signals an expansion of the notion of "composition".

The musical score plays a fundamental role in this process because of its ability to record time and contain it, freed from conventional notation it is forged in graphic and linguistic formats.

From this point on, a focused activity arises in the United States and Europe that affects all media and redefines the creative act in the different artistic disciplines. Variations on the Japanese garden invokes, through a discontinuous story, different times and spaces, from the East to the West, from the 19th century to the present day.

(Excerpt from the catalog, ed. La Casa Encendida, Madrid, 2014).