Lot 1535: TETSUYA NOGUCHI

TETSUYA NOGUCHI
(B. 1980)
Sleeping Head; & Talking Head
one acrylic on paper; & one resin, fiber and synthetic lacquer sculpture
60 x 91 cm. (23 5/8 x 35 7/8 in.); & 38 x 47 x 83 cm. (15 x 18 1/2 x 32 5/8 in.) (2)
Executed in 2009-2010 (2)

The Pillow Book, a classic Japanese work of literature produced in the Heian era, discoursed on aesthetics in a way acutely representative of the Japanese culture: "All things small, no matter what they are, all things small are beautiful." In his contemporary artwork Tetsuya Noguchi augments this traditional respect for subtlety. The Japanese way of appreciating exquisite delicacy is transformed into Noguchi's pursuit of "preciseness"; his sculpture, a feudal Japanese warrior in armor, is a miniature of the life size model perfectly scaled-down, with its skin and hairs meticulously handled and every piece of the armor crafted by the own fair hand of the artist. Compare with the previous smaller artifacts of Noguchi, Talking Head (Lot 1535), as the sculpture is named, is indubitably more challenging in its carving - the integrity of the details has to be taken care of against the scaled structure of the sculpture. It showcases the artist's consummate skills and his insistence on precise creation. The installation, moreover, which juxtaposes the flat painting Sleeping Head (Lot 1535) with the three-dimensional sculpture, obscures our conventional way of looking at art and history. It has been a traditional technique to imitate as closely as possible the real world to visualize space on a flat surface. The art of Noguchi, however, at one and the same time evinces the solid existence of the samurai in the form of realistic sculpture and brings back the historical fragment of the samurai's life through the painting, rendered obsolete and frayed. The juxtaposition seems to have set forth a midway between the real and virtual worlds, blurring the borderline between the present and the past.

Talking Head and Sleeping Head owe their inspiration to a horror-comedy anime, the Dororon Enma-kun, drawn by Go Nagai, an eminent Japanese manga artist. The protagonist of the story combated against the wicked with the assistance of an old ghost inhabited in his hat. Noguchi as a child was deeply impressed; the artist, therefore, bestows upon the helmet the power to communicate, grasps on the flat canvas the instant when the helmet and his master took rest, and capsulate his brisk gesturing in the sculpture. While the classical forms are shrewdly analyzed and maneuvered, as shown in the traditional portrayal of the samurai and the craft with which the ancient helmet is made, the artist's attendance to texturing, which materializes the once factual existence of the warrior, demonstrates his valiant will to reproduce the essence of history. With the jocose expression the artist effaces from the helmet its frightful, defensive wartime traits and affixes to it his own imagination; the spirited helmet seems to be a double of his master's consciousness. This very personification of the helmet exemplifies a unique Oriental vision of life, which holds that the nature of all living things, be it animal, plant or human being, is essentially the same. As the audience intuits the personality and emotion the artist afforded the animalized helmet, they are made to engage in the dialogue between the samurai and his helmet all through motion and stillness, and to immerse themselves in the fiction of history Noguchi creates.