Yoshio Kitayama
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Yoshio Kitayama (北山善夫, born 1948) is a Japanese artist born in Shiga prefecture in 1948 and based in Kyoto. He represented Japan for the 40th Venice Biennale in 1982 and has participated in the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial and the Setouchi Triennial.[1][2]
He is known for his two-dimensional works which fall into a few categories: clay figures; works consisting of countless small circles are painstakingly done on Japanese style paper using pencil; or sculptures using bamboo twigs.[1][2]
Kitayama became ill and almost died of illness at the age of ten. Kitayama began drawing at a young age and studied various genres of fine arts such as oil painting, sculpture, dessin sketching, etching, and Japanese ink painting. Upon graduating from Junior High School, he began working in traditional Japanese yuzen dyeing practice in Kyoto at 16. He says the pattern design aspect of this work experience gave him valuable lessons in color usage, expression of two and three-dimensional images, and transferring realism to abstraction.[citation needed]
When Kitayama was 18, he experienced a recurrence of his illness and was bedridden for one year. During that time, he decided to commit himself to his artistic aspirations. He began to exhibit his works when he was in his late 20s. His early works were influenced by the Mono-ha, and he studied various Western historical art movements.[3]
Early works
In an essay describing Kitayama's work, art historian Lise Seisbøll explains the early trajectory of Kitayama's works. At first, he had restricted his drawings to a flat surface, often using frottage, but upon seeing the way his children created images unconfined by the two-dimensional surface, Kitayama began experimenting with incorporating bamboo twigs into his two-dimensional drawings. Seisbøll frames Kitayama's experimentation with bamboo in the post-Mono-ha period of Japanese art. She describes Mono-ha's focus on “materials that are artistically new but nationally familiar… especially wood, stone and paper.. Generally speaking the works also become architectonic, since they gain more and more affinity with the art of Japanese gardening, so rich in tradition.” His experimentation with bamboo in his two dimensional works lead to completely three-dimensional works as he began to create more structurally intricate sculptures using bamboo, paper, leather, and cloth. Although he has continued to work in drawing and in sculpture, both small and large scale, bamboo is a through line in the evolution of Kitayama's three-dimensional oeuvre. In the conclusion of her essay, Seisbøll references Japanese art critic Nakahara Yusuke's analysis of Kitayama's work:
Kitayama retains his Japanesesness precisely because of the extremely personal adaption of his materials. By his choice of materials and his technique the artist has preserved a strong feeling of nature… Kitayama's works seem therefore to offer a new interpretation of the oriental kite tradition, while using an artistic language that seems familiar to the Western Eye.[4]
Large-scale works
In the 1990s, Kitayama's three-dimensional sculptures became much more prominent, filling gallery spaces. He participated in the 1982 Venice Biennale with Naoyoshi Hikosaka and Tadashi Kawamata, and presented a large-scale three-dimensional works composed of Japanese paper, bamboo, leather, and cloth.[5] His works were also included in the Asian Art Biennale in Bangladesh in 1983 and 2003 and the Indian Triennale in 1991.[citation needed]
Kitayama's works were also included in the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale in 2000 with an installation of a large-scale sculpture of bamboo and paper which hung in the Tsuchikura Branch Elementary School.[1] His works were also included in the Setouchi Triennale. His works were also included in the Oku-Noto Triennale in 2023.[6] He also showed at The Carnegie International in 1982 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.[7]