Tosh Talks: Yves Klein Japan

"Yves Klein: Japan

Text by Terhi Génévrier-Tausti, Denys Riout. (DILECTA)

I love this book because it deals with my two favorite subject matters: Yves Klein and Japan. In a manner, it's the same subject matter. The book focuses on Klein's trip to Japan to study Judo, a passion of his, even before doing art. Both of his parents were painters, and, interestingly, he marks himself in a different interest. Eventually, he does focus on art, but his passion for leaving France to another world is a curiosity that an artist usually shares. Once he reaches Japan, he is concerned about organizing an exhibition for his parent's artwork and focusing on his Judo studies.

The heart of "Yves Klein Japan" is that it's a scrapbook of his time in Tokyo and other cities. Told in a chronicle order of time in relying on the people he met and Japan's sights. He arrived in 1952 and stayed in the country for 15 months. There are photographs of travel documents, souvenirs he purchased, handwritten letters to his parents, the French Government to secure a visa in Japan, as well as correspondence and art he made for friends on postcards. To travel to Japan in the 1950s after the war was made only by the few, and it must have been a strange world to visit. Like all first-time visitors to Tokyo, one is struck by the neon lights at dusk and night, and to this day, it's exactly the same landscape.

Klein also visited the island of Oshima, which is a few hours away from Tokyo. I stayed on this island for three-weeks, during an art festival. There is very little information in English about this island, which has an active volcano. Klein comments to a friend on a postcard how surreal the landscape is around the volcano area. This is the cliche statement to make when one visits such a place, but it is also 100% true. The starkness of the area around the volcano is colorless in a sense but very livid in its black and gray rocks that surround the area. It's the opposite of Klein's later work and his interest in colors. I feel such foreign earth must have made an impression on his aesthetic in later years. It's very much the opposite of his art, but there is a similar texture and heat issue. Klein looked at colors and fire as a spiritual aspect of life. Although this is more of natural science, it does convey a brutal spirituality in itself.

Judo is a sculpture in action. It is also a ritual art with rules and boundaries. Klein's work was also in the same mode when he did his performances and even the music he wrote for his first symphony, where it's one-note for 20 minutes and then silent for the next 20. The ritual in his work, I think, came from his visit to and study of Japanese culture—specifically Judo, of course.

I'm such a Japanophile that I love to hear Westerners' first approach and visit to Japan. "Yves Klein Japan" hits that spot for me, as well as his personal observations of the cities and countryside of this part of Asia. One's culture or work is never an island in itself. It feeds from travel, thinking, and practice. Klein was a great artist and whose work is pretty magnificent. I don't think his contemporary art presence would have been the same if not for this trip to Japan. So, the physical objects are his art and this book, as well as Klein's instructional book Les fondements du Judo. "Yves Klein Japan" is an enchanting book.