An Iconoclast Who Sells Painting by Slices
Toshihiko Washio Translated by Masato Fujii
courtesy of the artist
The wall of the newly opened gallery ganglion extends some 20 meters. The entire surface of the wall is packed with about a dozen linked Japanese paper panels. These panels show vivid images depicted with a free touch, using pure and bright colors that could be described as Mediterranean.
You see naked men striking poses that hint at sexual impulses, you see sacred cows, elephants and lotuses from India, pine needles, sexually suggestive lobsters and snails, sinister crocodiles cavorting, and goats exposing their genitals. These objects, fraught with metaphors and allegories of primordial life, are scattered over a wide space of strikingly pure white, as if they had been scribbled by someone who has the touch and color palate of a refined savage.
This is the work of Chiaki Horikoshi, a master who draws effortlessly on an ever-unfolding roll of Japanese paper with an ink brush. This he will continue to do right to the close of the exhibition. Horikoshi is trying to complete his work before the eyes of gallery visitors.
There is an even more astonishing and iconoclastic streak in the event: if visitors want to buy some parts of this unfinished work, Horikoshi is ready to sell it by the slice. What does he then do about the lost parts of the work? He just redoes them by pasting on new sheets of paper, and recreating the missing parts from scratch. Like collages, the regenerated parts become new elements of the work.
As a brave experimentalist, Horikoshi is happy to crush conventions into pieces in the course of his work. This trait has made him popular, and will propel him even further.
Chiaki Horikoshi gallery ganglion, Ebisu, Tokyo
