“I move my hand and then I see it”: sensing and knowing with young artists in Japan

Abstract

When asked to reflect on their own creative practice, contemporary artists in Osaka would frequently invoke images of movement. In lieu of a preformed mental image or plan, they would emphasise the processual and emergent nature of creating a work of art and the importance of moving one's body, likening the gradual and meandering nature of their understanding to a “path.” At the same time, they would often compare their own lives to a path, albeit one with a far less visible endpoint than that which lay ahead of practitioners of the traditional Japanese arts. Along this particular life path, one must move without a clear idea of where one is headed; the path is laid down as one moves along it. “Feeling with the world” and sensing in collaboration with others, emerges as a mode of knowing.

Keywords:

• Japan
• artists
• art-work
• imagination
• agency
• the body

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures and hosted by Scott North, whose support made this work possible. I am grateful to Andrea De Antoni and Emma Cook for their excellent editorial guidance. I would like to thank Inge Daniels, Roger Goodman, Maruska Svasek and Alex Flynn for their insightful comments on an earlier drafts of this paper. Conversations with Kaori Dohgase, Jerry Gordon and Tesshu Kuhara in the field were invaluable, both in the field and upon my return, and I owe them special thanks.

Notes

1 A similar movement has been described by Michel Jackson as an interplay between the “world within and the world without” (2016, 2–3).

2 This research began in 2013, with a 9-month fieldwork stay in Osaka. I had already become acquainted with several contemporary artists during my fieldwork in 2008 and collaborated with several. The fieldwork comprised gallery visits, participant observation at a range of regular art events and meetings, atelier visits and semi-structured interviews with artists who were a part of a loose network of contemporary artists. Many knew each other and attended each other’s events, but they were not part of a firmly structured collective. Whenever possible, video and audio recordings were made, alongside fieldnotes that attended to the affective and sensory (see Pink 2009).

3 In some other ways, Osaka is a good place to study art production outside the major art centers, such as Tokyo or New York. At the same time, it is a major urban center and has a large and multi-layered art scene and offers multiple opportunities for additional or alternative employment for those artists who cannot or do not wish to make a living from their art-work alone.

4 Art-work, as discussed earlier, is a form of work. The length of this article does not permit a fuller discussion of labor, employment and work among the contemporary artists in Japan. As creativity is increasingly recognized as an indispensable part of a wide variety of professions, the idea of creativity gains prominence while at the same time growing ever more diluted and vague. Discourses of creativity have become ever more a part of the post-industrial workplace and co-opted in managerial practice, which arguably further redefines “being creative” as implying being self-driven, or an independent problem-solver, or simply “resourceful” (Sansi 2015: 116). Furthermore, in this way workers are encouraged to identify with their job, dissolving the boundary between work and leisure time. Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) thus see art as an example of post-Fordist work par excellence. While prominent current discussions of the experience of the creative process emphasize making (Ingold 2013), I consider art as work in order to emphasize labor. This involves attending to work as effort and as remunerated labor, as a meaningful pursuit and as a career, exploring how it intersects with the life course (Kavedžija forthcoming). In this case, rather than considering art in the context of labor more broadly, I want to focus on imagination as a form of labor of “feeling with the world.”

5 This compulsion to work is distinct from a more widespread sense that one “ought to be working” or “ought to be seen to be working” – it is not the mere sense that one should be somehow employed and kept busy. Instead it reflects a deep sense of motivation and drive. This sense of drive is, of course, not unique to the Japanese context or to the young Japanese artists, and has been described by psychologists of creativity (Csikszentmihalyi 1998).

6 A more elaborate discussion of events and their temporality is required, but it exceeds the scope of this article.

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Iza Kavedžija

Iza Kavedžija is a Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Exeter. Her research interests include meaning in life, motivation, life choices, wellbeing, aging and the life course. She specializes in the anthropology of Japan, and her doctoral research, at the University of Oxford, examined the construction of meaning in life and the experience of aging among older people in Osaka. A monograph based on this work, entitled Making Meaningful Lives: Tales from Aging Japan, is forthcoming with the University of Pennsylvania Press.