A Gaze to the Common “Life” -- On the Occasion of Minemoto’s Solo Show in Taiwan

Mio TOMIYORI (Art Critic)

First of all, I am delighted that Minemoto's exhibition in Taiwan be realized again after two years. Since the first show carried out in the midst of COVID-19 crisis under strict isolation policy, which prevented the artist from being present at gallery, it is fortunate that the people in Taiwan have the second opportunity to feel free to visit her exhibition. Also, it is surprising that the artist has been all the more energetic in the volume of her activities and the development of her works even during the mature phase of her career, to the extent that it can be said she is at the second peak of her career.

As I already wrote about the trajectory of Minemoto's work before, this time I would like to start with referring to her personality in daily life, which I believe is the quickest way to understand the world represented in her work.

My relationship with the artist dates back to my university days. The "standard course" of my visiting her atelier includes looking at her works in the room filled with the smell of oil paints, eating her colorful and nutritious home-cooked meals (you should know her meals are plentiful and extremely tasty,) having a lot of talk, before returning home with a heavy stomach and some warmth in my heart. I wonder her atmosphere such as her smile and the way she talks seems to generate some good flow of energy like the calm but cheerful brilliance of sunlight, making me feel at ease from the bottom of my heart.

I used the word "the sunlight" earlier, perhaps because the yellow dots that always appear in Minemoto’s works evoked that image. When she completes the work, she never forgets to filter the whole canvas with the grid of yellow dots, which resemble particles of light, making an essential component of her paintings. This “ritual” of filtering with dots is a way to create distance between herself and the world, according to the artist. However, this distancing does not mean that she is looking at the world in a cold, indifferent manner from an alien perspective. Her gaze rather envelops the everyday world, making it a part of her, as if a sunlight is shining down on every little life.

Then let us turn our attention to the motifs covered with this yellow layer. You will see Minemoto’s choice of motifs indicates that they are picked up by her synchronization with the common "life” she encounters in everyday life.

It is particularly remarkable in her most recent works that she is slowly shifting the style of paintings from the abstract to the figurative again (although her creation is not necessarily bound by the dichotomy of "figurative" and "abstract").

As her recent abstract works, the series Fever Plants is representative. In this series, the organic plant-like shapes stretch across the entire canvas. The compositions look as if her energy just occasionally passed through the canvas, rather than she intentionally composed it. This series of works can be positioned as a new abstract expression that she has arrived at after minimalist style at her debut and figurative expression from the mid 90s.

Interestingly, as mentioned earlier, her most recent works are shifting to the figuration again this year. The most important motif is a tree. Her focus on this motif has its direct root in her having raised an opposition movement against the felling of a 100-year-old camphor tree in her hometown. In parallel with this movement, the expressions of plants which was formerly abstract have been replaced by figurative representations of trees with distinguishable trunks, branches, or leaves. The images of trees in her works sometimes extend its silhouette across the entire picture, and at other times float on an illusory surface of marbled colors, which appear to emerge from her uncertain memory rather than exist as a solid substance.

As the artist refers to her current expression as "having opened a new door," it seems that her energy, which had been emanating formlessly and freely in the Fever Plant series, has been internalized and connected to the concrete figure of trees. It can be also said that her energy tends to be connected to something familiar in her daily life, including trees. To implicate this, her trees sometimes appear on canvas with other motifs such as a fountain and a river, all of which can be seen in the park where she walks on a daily basis.

It is after picking up these motifs from her preconsciousness that she will finally finish the work through the ritual of yellow dots for detaching outpouring of these energies from herself. In this case, her yellow filter functions as distancing herself not only from the world, but also from the piece of art she created. In other words, her ritual may be a kind of statement to stop intervening in the work as an "author" and to send it over to the world as an individual.

Although it is not uncommon to discuss the relationship between an artist and a piece of art as traces of artists’ act, Minemoto is completely irrelevant of paternalistic authority of the "author" in the art history, but closer to the "mother” of the work. Considering that, it is symbolic that she herself compares the yellow dots to "the heartbeat of a pregnant baby.” For the artist, her works might be like a child in her belly, a part of herself but separated as an individual, which is partly why her works, while synchronized with the art historical context, have a kind of freshness and universality that talks to the viewer's inner state free from any formulaic convention.

In the text for the last exhibition, I described Minemoto’s works as "affirmative" paintings. Intuitively, the way how she treats and accepts this world will evoke a kind of warmth like the sun, the same impression I always have when I meet her. I believe when the viewer is invited to look behind the yellow filter for entering her world, s/he might already become a child in the belly, wrapped in the yellow dots of her gaze.

I sincerely hope that this second solo show will provide an opportunity for the people of Taiwan to feel the energy of her gaze.