Colour as Touch
Ian Hunt
'Walking up a mountain, we arrive at the top. Once there, why not jump toward the sky?' – Lee Ufan
Alongside a consistent studio practice of painting, Yuko Shiraishi makes temporary installations, permanent murals and collaborations that enter the realm of design. There are areas of considerable overlap between her practices inside and outside the studio. The most striking common factor is the exploration of colour, very often unmixed and bright colour. There is also a persistent engagement with the way the perceiving body encounters these different types of work. The installations, such as that made in homage to Joseph Albers, often include somewhere to sit: 'I am interested in the physical acts of sitting and standing. I want to create environments that can be experienced in different ways according to whether one is sitting or standing'.¹ The paintings too make us intensely aware of the place we stand in, and of our vertical axis. Her latest installation, Space Elevator Teahouse, in contrast with the others, shows the possibility of sitting – or rather kneeling, as it is a full–size diagram based on a traditional Japanese tea house – but does not let us enter. The door and crawl–door (designed to instil humility in any Samurai who entered as a guest) are both clearly marked in red, but we are made to stand outside, and wonder about the column of light that runs right through to the ceiling, seemingly extending into the beyond.
Shiraishi's dual practice also emphasises the differences between ways of working outside and inside the studio – differences which interact productively. Working with flat paint finishes on walls, and designing objects within architectural constraints, have perhaps contributed to subtle freedoms in the application of paint that have emerged in her studio work. Shiraishi's recent paintings show less thickness in the paint compared with the earliest ones, where it was sometimes combed; however, the freedom, individuality and lack of guile with which it is used seem even more apparent. Hand–made qualities are to the fore. This is affirmative work: it affirms the viewer's presence, and also retains a matter–of–fact quality, not seeking to engulf the viewer or to mystify.
It also occupies a special position between East Asian and Western thinking. Shiraishi is thoroughly involved in modernist art, matter–of–factness and materialism, and it would be wrong to approach her work to isolate its Japanese qualities or indeed its feminine qualities. Nevertheless, she is also an artist who has moved from one side of the world to the other. Space Elevator Teahouse, in portraying a clash of vertical and horizontal, invites us to consider how space, place and direction are understood and valued in different cultures. Shiriashi's work as a whole also reveals common ground between East and West at the level of perception and embodiment.
Space Elevator Teahouse
Space Elevator Teahouse is a combination of two things that do not seem to belong in the same universe. It is a diagram of a traditional Japanese tea house, intimate in scale.² Through the middle of this tea house without walls is a solid column of light, extending beyond the roof to the ceiling of the gallery. In imagination it can be seen to go on, into the sky. The area of the tea house is small, based on four and a half tatami mats. A tatami mat is the basic measure of floor area in Japanese houses: one mat is enough space for a person to sleep on. Shiraishi explains that 'when you sit up, you have all the space you need', and sees a connection with the design of spacecraft, which have to be fitted as snugly as possible around the scale of their occupants; she also mentions the 'ten–foot hut' of the 12th–century poet Kamo–no–Chomei.³
A space elevator is not a building (a tower) or a spaceship. It is a cable stretched from a satellite in geostationary orbit down to the earth's surface. It is therefore a kind of bridge that goes upwards, or a hook that goes downwards, except that as gravity reduces towards the upper end, 35,000 km out, the words up and down start to lose their meaning. Space elevators were first theorised by the rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1895. He did conceive the elevator as a kind of tower, inspired by the Eiffel Tower – which at such height would collapse under its own weight. Subsequently, space elevators have been pursued as tethers, and various materials for the cable have been proposed. Space elevators are an area of intense research and competition, as they would eliminate the need for rocket fuel in order to leave the earth's orbit. Arthur C. Clarke's novel The Fountains of Paradise, written before the discovery of carbon–60 (buckminsterfullerene), postulated diamond fibre as the material. The discovery of C–60 in 1985 has given space elevator schemes a push. It can be used to make intensely strong nanotubes, and it is on these that the current best hopes for a space elevator are based; a scheme using them is being pursued vigorously in Japan, where there is much popular interest in the subject. Space elevators may appear to be in the realm of science fiction, but they are already in the realm of engineering and economics.
How then, does a space elevator meet a tea house? At wherever pride in the vertical and striving for the beyond meets the humility of the horizontal and the human plane. Tea house architecture is humble – the journey through a garden towards it is of as much significance as the building itself. Though the tea ceremony may have been useful for an aristocratic and warrior class to purify itself, it works, like any well designed ritual, in ways that are not fully circumscribed by its social setting. A guest can learn not just about rustic withdrawal from the world and the beauty of tea bowls, but that most difficult thing: how to receive a gift.
Concern for the setting and the horizontal axis is an important characteristic of traditional Japanese architecture. The horizontal emphasis is apparent even in the building of towers. Consider pagodas, which are made from tiers of roof upon roof, becoming progressively smaller. The horizontal eave–lines of each stage of the tower make a satisfying connection with the ground–line. Pagodas do not race to the sky but express a relation to the earth and the horizon even as they rise above it. Space Elevator Teahouse does have an element which races to the sky, an idea of verticality contradicting the horizontal emphasis and intimate human scale. It also emphasises the distinction between the floor and the ground: the floor of the tea house is elevated, on a low plinth. The distinction between floor and ground is so basic that we do not usually think about it. Lee Ufan proposes that 'Floors are postulated space; the ground an actual space. A city is conceptually based on floors, and a village on the ground. Architecture today is a conception based on the floor, be it on level or sloped ground, whereas the ground is a place accompanied by diverse actualities connected with nature–reality. The floor is a place of intense ideality with certain unseen architectonics'.³ In setting the tea house on a low plinth on a floor that already, in a gallery, functions as a plinth, Shiraishi presents it in the air, as a conception. Tea houses, rustic huts and sheds show how the plane of the floor sits in relation to the ground. The raised Space Elevator Tea House makes one aware of a relationship to the ground that is missing.
Horizontal and vertical
It is useful to think about the words themselves. Horizontal has a direct connection with the word horizon, which denotes an unavoidable and reassuring feature of experience. The word vertical functions comprehensibly as an opposite of horizontal, but it does not have a familiar, everywhere experienced phenomenon such as the horizon to back it up. The vertical exists abstractly, invisibly, in relation to the horizon. Many things, humans included, possess a vertical axis around which they are organised. Humans, trees, buildings and towers also provide strong emblems of verticality, and the word vertical derives from the Latin word vertex, for 'whirlpool, crown of head' – so there is at least a buried etymological connection between the vertical and the human body. But none of this compares to the authority of the horizon as a ground of perception. The vertical is an adjective that can be made into a noun, and it exists as an idea. As such it is real, but the horizon, in contrast, is not only an idea. When we look at a horizon, however uneven the relief of the landscape, we can use it to establish what is high or low, near or far. Horizons exist; and unlike vertical lines, they are not straight. In Merleau–Ponty's writings on perception, which superbly explain the way the perceiving subject is embodied, the horizon takes on specific significance:
The horizon, then, is what guarantees the identity of the object throughout the exploration; it is the correlative of the impending power which my gaze retains over the objects which it has just surveyed, and which it already has over the fresh details it is about to discover. […] The object–horizon structure, or the perspective, is no obstacle to me when I want to see the object: for just as it is the means whereby objects are distinguished from each other, it is also the mean whereby they are disclosed. To see is to enter a universe of beings which display themselves, and they would not do this if they could not be hidden behind each other or behind me.⁴
The horizon features here almost as a value: as that which permits us to understand how, as Merleau–Ponty puts it, 'every object is the mirror of all others'. His thinking is also uniquely attuned to what art, as a form of knowledge, contributes to this understanding.
There are more basic cultural ideas about horizontality that can be considered. Buddhist thought describes a progression of levels of enlightenment, but it also preserves a strong horizontal aspect: these levels coexist. Enlightenment does not mean escaping gravity or building towers to reach Heaven. East Asian thought identifies frequently identifies itself with the horizontal as a value. This appears clearly in the writings of the artist Lee Ufan, which are informed by close familiarity with Merleau–Ponty's ideas:
We humans construct our view of the world from the perspective of our own eyes as we stand in a certain place. Therefore, we construct our own space, consisting of a vertical axis and a horizontal axis, not from the ground but from the perspective of our eyes.
The horizontal axis presents an image of nothingness in an indefinite extension. The vertical axis presents an image of the absolute in a conceptual extension. I suspect that we have developed the ability to erect things because of our ability to conceive things along these axes crossing at our eyes. Modern European thought, by the way, has placed its emphasis on the vertical axis, while East Asian concepts place their emphasis more on the horizontal axis. In any case, our conception of space is abstract and unstable essentially because the two axes are centred not on the ground, but in the air. This up–in–the–air–ness delimits the nature of human civilisation and drives us to visualise the world and dreams in a certain way.⁵
The idea that European thought emphasises the vertical and East Asian the horizontal is clearly a shorthand for a variety of other questions about the relative value of space and place (Japanese: basho) in culture. It has not stopped the building of some extremely tall towers in Japan. This deep–seated emphasis on the horizontal is nevertheless worth considering in a number of different contexts.
Yuko Shiraishi has pointed me towards comparative studies of near–death experiences. These share many features, across cultures – a sense of judgment or self–accounting, encounters with family and loved ones – but Christian–informed western accounts often feature a tunnel towards light, whereas Japanese accounts frequently involve standing at the boundary made by a brook, river or pond, and give a sense of crossing to a place more continuous, on a horizontal axis, with where one started from⁶. More generally boundaries – paradigmatically between life and death, but also between inside and out, and body and mind – are not interpreted in exactly the same ways in East Asia and Europe. Shiraishi's work sits comfortably in Europe and within western culture but it nonetheless uses some basic concepts, categories and directions with a different inflection.
Warp and woof
English seems very apt in linking the everyday concept of the horizontal to a grand word like horizon, with its other meaning of 'limit of mental perception, experience, interest'. But language makes use of a set of arbitrary sounds in a system in order to make meaning. In Japanese a horizon is chiheisen, a land horizon, or suiheisen, a sea horizon, made from the characters for 'land' or 'sea' in combination with those for 'flat' and 'line'. The word for horizontal, yoko, is unconnected, and is made from characters meaning 'wood' and 'yellow' – the referent is a traditional type of belt worn around the waist. Yoko can also mean the woof of a loom. The word for vertical, tate, is made from the character for 'thread' and for 'warp': the threads stretched upright on a loom. When we speak we think little of origins of words. Japanese people probably do think a little more about these buried origins of their words than English speakers do, because of the ways the kanji characters in the part of the writing system that is logographic preserve these expressions of relation between root ideas. This is quite unlike alphabetic substitution for sound. It is intriguing that the word for vertical has a connection with weaving, an activity dependent on the reach of a human body, and horizontal with a belt, that ties around it.
Horizontal and vertical figure specifically in Yuko Shiraishi's paintings. Her preferred format is vertical, not square. The paintings therefore possess the quality of tallness: a physical connection with the height of a person. They take on a presence which is connected with their scale, and are made at a size of comfortable maximum reach. (Shiraishi likes to explain how Agnes Martin, having worked for years in a format of 6' x 6', began working at the age of 80 on 5' x 5' canvases, as she found she had become shorter.) The paintings are not in the format commonly known as 'portrait' but neither are they so wide as to stretch the multiple horizons, stripes or bands of colour too far either side of us. Our vision is comfortably bounded, not infinite, and the facts of manufacture and touch in the paintings keep us close. Shiraishi admires the small scale of Albers's work, its holding back from any wish to overwhelm, commenting that 'despite this, or rather because of it, they have a hugely powerful impact on us'.
In different contexts Shiraishi has explored the scale of vertical lines stretching high overhead. Her 2005 installation Kumo no Ito (Thread of the Spider), The Room Full of Mirrors, at Nijojo castle, Kyoto, extended threads upwards from polished aluminium mirrors, to the accompaniment of a variety of sounds, including music by Jimi Hendrix and poems by Kazuko Shiraishi. The threads were a reference to a well known story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa in which Buddha sends a spider and its thread down into hell to a sinner: a criminal who once spared the life of a spider. Climbing up the thread however, he is followed by other sinners and kicks them back down, causing the thread to break. He condemns himself by concern only for his own salvation. Shiraishi has also explored horizontal lines that stretch either side of vision. In the Museum Wiesbaden installation (2002), a yellow line ran at eye level around walls delicately washed with red and blue – its horizontality both interrupted by and emphasising the presence of multiple stone columns. In Anableps Anableps/ Cuatro ojos (Annely Juda Fine Art, 2005) the horizontal line, interrupted by reflective glass boxes, divided the space at eye level as though marking a boundary between air and water. This made you aware of the difference between sitting and standing: it was a place designed for sitting in which one's head was below the notional water–line.
In Shiraishi's recent paintings the horizon lines and peripheral aspects of vision are contained. Colour is concentrated and held. The paintings make use of multiple bands and horizontal lines, and this releases effects caused by persistence of vision. Any tilt of your head or swaying of your body from its vertical axis as you shift weight from foot to foot releases complementary colours, which are temporarily produced in the brain as after–effects of the eye's adjustment to the colours in front of it. The tallness of the paintings and their banded design makes one strongly aware of these axes of vertical and horizontal, crossing at one's eyes.
Colour as touch
Yuko Shiraishi's paintings have an overall energy produced by their colour – which is always at the same time understood as touch. In her essay on Joseph Albers, Shiraishi quotes from a poem by Paul Klee, 'One eye that sees,/Another that feels'. Her paintings invite us to approach: a sense of their material and how they are made is an essential part of the pleasure they give. They are finite objects, determined by human reach, not infinite extensions into space or fantastic constructions; and their bounded space is animated by the strongly affirmative use of bright colours in relation.
What is this colour like? A short answer is that it is like van Gogh's colour. Cézanne may occupy art history's highest peak, as the artist who seems to show the phenomenology of perception at work, but van Gogh – an artist Shiraishi has studied closely – achieved an understanding of colour as touch that is equally profound. His work manages to accommodate powerful human feeling – fellow–feeling, more importantly than his own – and a sense of the mind and the body actively communicating about what it sees. In the late paintings especially van Gogh made brushstrokes of colour into organised and coded equivalents that are intensely physical. In the drawings in reed pen, short lines were used in combination to describe forms: the drawings convey an idea of colour through the intensity of this coding. The strokes and touches give expression to the world, so that stone, plants, earth, buildings, people and weather all seem animate. Colour is not constructed to form a modulated equivalent to perception, as in Cézanne, but there is nevertheless another kind of fidelity to what is outside the self in van Gogh's marks. It was not necessary to work direct from the motif to make this fidelity: memories, other pictures or illustrations could equally provide a basis for it.
Consider Recollection of Brabant, 1890, one of a series of pictures in which van Gogh returned in imagination to the Dutch landscape in which he grew up. Land and sky alike are made from a limited scheme of green, brown and orange marks: 'Even while my illness was at its worst I kept painting, among other things a memory of Brabant, hovels with moss–covered roofs and beech hedges, on an autumn evening with a stormy sky, the sun setting amid reddish clouds' (letter 629a). The colour scheme is designed, synthetic; nowhere could such a green sky be seen. But a landscape distant in memory and space – the large sun makes it fell like a section of a far horizon – is touched by it, brought close. The colour, which insists on a relationship between earth and sky, is also being used to portray an essential connectedness: no object discloses itself to us without disclosing others. The strokes, likewise, do not enforce a sense that the world is made of the same stuff, but allow it to disclose its variety within an essential connectedness. Shiraishi is especially interested in how the marks that are visible in the early paintings from Nuenen (notably The Potato Eaters) return in the later works, after the period in Paris when van Gogh's rapid self–education in art led him sometimes to lose his sureness of physical touch.
It is the sense of colour as touch that connects the two artists, not specific colour contrasts or modes of application. The touch – the fidelity – manifests itself in a different way, as one would expect at a different historical and stylistic moment. Shiraishi's touch makes use of thick against thin expanses, ruled crayon lines, signs of manual construction and adjustment: one colour overlaying another. The hand is present here in the signs of unevenness of coverage, which is perhaps more present in recent paintings than it has been before. It is not always clear how the unevenness has come about. In Walkin' on the Sky the green–yellow lines appear blotted, the ground (mauvish–pink over lemon yellow) substantial but mysterious in how one colour appears independently through another. The effect is acid. In Stormy Afternoon the blue ground is highly liquid, quickly washed in, and the lighter density admits much more air. There is a clear sense of looking through the lines as though to a distance. In Catch the Wind the ground is fat bluish–white over scarlet, and the combination is almost metallic. The colours do not resemble those in nature, any more than van Gogh's do, but their presence as touch, an aspect of the rhetoric of painting which Shiraishi negotiates with discretion as well as strength, gives them a fidelity we can readily use and apply.
A feature of the newer paintings is the greater number of colours brought into relation with one another, and a preference for narrower lines rather than wider bands of colour. In some works, such as Moving Through Time, no system of repeats is used for the selection of six coloured lines over green. The narrower lines tend to expose the hand's human shakiness, which is claimed: it becomes one of the means by which colour discloses itself. Every colour is involved in all other colours, every object is the mirror of all others, and this is revealed not as a nostalgic vision of unity but as a material fact to be known and shared.
1.     Yuko Shiraishi, 'To Open Eyes' in Josef Albers/Yuko Shiraishi: A Way of Seeing, Leonard Hutton Galleries, New York, 2006, p.42.
2.     See Kazuo Nishi & Kazuo Hozomi, What is Japanese Architecture?, Kodansha International, 1996, pp. 105–119. The model is the Yuin ('again retiring') teahouse, made by Gempaku Sotan in the 17th century.
3.     Kamo–no–Chomei, Hojoki: Visions of a Torn World, tr. Yasuhiko Moriguchi & David Jenkins, Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, 1996.
3.     Lee Ufan, Selected Writings, ed. Jean Fisher, Lisson Gallery, London, 1996, p.17.
4.     Maurice Merleau–Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception [1945], Routledge, London, 2003, pp. 78–79.
5.     Lee Ufan, p.15.
6.     See Ornella Corazza, Near–Death Experiences: exploring the mind–body connection, Routledge, 2008, which draws on the thinking of Yasuo Yuasa.