Tatsuo Kawaguchi

Everyone has someone they don’t want to die earlier than they did. For me, Yusuke Nakahara was unquestionably one of them.

When I suddenly heard the news of his death, an immeasurable void was created in my heart, and tears flowed out endlessly, as if to fill that void. ＜I was reminded of the cruelty of life replacing the irrelevance of death. I asked myself whether art could remedy this cruelty. And now, beyond the sadness, I am reminded that we must pass on his wonderful achievements that will redeem the present and future of art.

Mr Nakahara was born in my hometown of Kobe. While a student at Kyoto University’s Faculty of Science, he studied physics under Nobel laureate Dr Yukawa before taking up art criticism, a seemingly different field. He won the Art Criticism Award sponsored by Bijutsu Shuppansha, a gateway to success for art critics, for his ‘Criticism for Creation’. His criticism has continued to provide us, the artists, with inspiration, vitality, thought and imagination for expression and creation.

He strove to establish a critique of art that was detached from the literary aspect. He succeeded in establishing a critique that was theoretical rather than emotional, clear, easy to understand and sharply focused on the essence of the work, making use of the excellent thinking skills he had developed in physics. I think it amounted to ‘criticism beyond creation’.

He was also a commissioner for international exhibitions such as the Paris, Sao Paulo and Venice Biennials, and was active in developing innovative projects such as the ‘Room of Absence’ exhibition (1963) and the 10th Tokyo Biennale ‘Man and Matter’ (1970). In particular, he was the first in Japan to serve as sole commissioner for an international exhibition, and selected 40 artists from around the world with a unique perspective, using the eyes and feet of critic Yusuke Nakahara at a time when there was no internet, mobile phones or fax machines. He has realised an outstanding temporary exhibition that is still internationally acclaimed. It was a fateful event for me to be chosen as one of them.

He has written many books, including The Aesthetics of Nonsense (1962), The Myth of Seeing (1972), Between Man and Material (1975), The Story of a Great Invention (1975) and Contemporary Art (1982), and his influence on the art world is significant. I was also fortunate to have had published a book-in-book, ‘Relation and Irrelevance: Tatsuo Kawaguchi’s Theory’ (2003), which was born from my collaboration with Mr Nakahara.

Meanwhile, Mr Nakahara served as President of Kyoto Seika University, General Director of Art Tower Mito, President of the Art Critics Circle and Director of the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art. During his tenure as director of the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, the exhibition ‘Tatsuo Kawaguchi: The Invisible and the Visible’ (2007) was held, and he gave the opening address and held a dialogue with me, writing a text with the same title as the subtitle. That was the last critique he wrote about my work. Looking back, I think that Mr Nakahara, too, continued to put into words the ‘invisible’ while standing on the ‘visible’.

Mr Nakahara, who brilliantly related art and words, was my nurturing parent as an artist and a compass on the sea of art. It is with a heavy heart that I have lost a giant star in Yusuke Nakahara. With gratitude, I join my hands in prayer.

(The following is an obituary commissioned by the Kobe Shimbun (17 March 2011 morning edition).