Parallel Modernities: Reading 'Contemporary Dyeing Expression 1991–2025' (Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art) Between Living National Treasures and Kera

Introduction: Two 'Other Histories of Japanese Art'

This year, the Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art presented two 'other histories of Japanese art' in succession.

Held from February to May, 'Japanese Painting Avant-Garde KYOTO 1948-1970' was an exhibition introducing painters who re-examined the framework of 'Nihonga' (Japanese-style painting) in postwar Kyoto, centered on the Sozo Bijutsu, Pan-Real Art Association, and Kera Art Association. These were people who attempted to break the boundaries between the existing art world and Nihonga by incorporating not only mineral pigments and sumi ink, but also oil paints, enamel, lacquer, wax, cloth, mud, and even straw mats.

About two months after that exhibition ended, 'Contemporary Dyeing Expression 1991–2025' was held at the same museum.

This exhibition looked back on the thirty-five years of the Some-Seiryu Exhibition, which began in 1991, through approximately ninety major works. It gathered artists across different schools, purchased works, formed a collection, and eventually established a museum specializing in dyeing. The history of that system and its works lined the white walls of the Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art.

One was the avant-garde of postwar Nihonga. The other was a selection exhibition of contemporary dyeing.

The two appear to be separate exhibitions. However, to me, it seemed as though they were illuminating the same question from different locations.

Perhaps modern Japanese art did not Westernize along a single path.

While sharing the Western-derived vessels of schools, exhibitions, museums, open calls, and juries, art, calligraphy, and dyeing each carried different pasts and norms, creating separate modernities. What we have called 'avant-garde,' 'tradition,' 'contemporary art,' and 'craft' may have been divided not only by differences in the forms themselves, but by which group one belonged to, which exhibition one submitted to, and which system recognized one's value.

As a figure who connects these two exhibitions, Kunihiko Moriguchi came to my mind.

In 1959, young painters who graduated from the Nihonga department of the Kyoto City College of Fine Arts formed the Kera Art Association. Around the same time, Moriguchi was in the same Nihonga department.

Moriguchi is not a member of Kera. The issue I want to raise here is not a direct influence relationship from Kera to Moriguchi. What I want to focus on is that the period from 1959 to 1964, when Kera was active, overlaps with the time Moriguchi was studying in the Nihonga department and graduating in 1963.

The formal questions that existed in the same era, the same city, and the same school subsequently diverged into different systems.

The painters of Kera entered the history of avant-garde Nihonga and contemporary art. Moriguchi studied graphic design in Paris, moved into Yuzen dyeing after returning to Japan, and in 2007 became a holder of the Important Intangible Cultural Property 'Yuzen,' a so-called Living National Treasure.

However, standing in front of Moriguchi's 'III-1-'92' at the 'Contemporary Dyeing Expression 1991–2025' venue, these two paths did not seem as distant as later classifications suggest.

Geometric lines and patterns are repeated across four rectangles. To me, it looked like a hard-edged abstract painting. However, the support is not canvas but Kumohada-mashi paper, the coloring material is mud pigment, and the technique is listed as Yuzen dyeing.

The work of the Living National Treasure appeared to me as the most modernist piece in the venue.

I would like to consider this exhibition starting from this paradox.

Chapter 1: Modernity Was Not a Single Path

Modern Japanese 'art' was created as an institution alongside the works themselves.

The Ministry of Education Art Exhibition, known as the Bunten, which began in 1907, established categories for Japanese-style painting, Western-style painting, and sculpture. It invited public submissions of works with individual names, judged them, and compared them in the same venue. The institutions of schools, exhibitions, museums, judging, awards, and genre classification were organized while referencing Western modern 'art.' In 1927, craft art was added, and in 1948, calligraphy was added.

Of course, the content of Japanese-style painting was not simply Westernized.

The very name 'Japanese-style painting' (Nihonga) is a modern classification born from a contrast with Western-style painting, and within it, traditional painting, Chinese painting, and Western painting interact in complex ways. Nevertheless, the central vessel—what we call a work, who we call an artist, and how we evaluate it publicly—was built around the Western-derived art system, and that remains unchanged.

However, not all fields put the same content into that vessel.

Calligraphy demonstrates this well.

Chapter 2: The Modernity Created by Calligraphy via China

Calligraphy also developed modern institutions such as organizations, public submissions, judging, selection, awards, and wall displays. In 1948, after the war, it became a section of the Nitten (Japan Fine Arts Exhibition), entering the same public exhibition space as painting, sculpture, and crafts.

However, at least for the important trends in the Meiji calligraphy world centered on Kanji calligraphy, the authority they looked up to for formal modeling was not Western painting.

It was the Chinese classics.

Moreover, this is not a story of simply preserving pre-modern traditions.

The Qing scholar Yang Shoujing, who came to Japan in 1880, was well-versed in epigraphy and, through his exchanges with figures like Kusakabe Meikaku, introduced the stele studies and rubbings of the late Qing dynasty to Japan. His visit became a major catalyst for the Meiji calligraphy world to reorganize its own norms.

Modern Japanese calligraphy did not simply maintain an old China. It rediscovered the Chinese classics via contemporary China and reorganized them as the new authority of the calligraphy world.

To put it boldly, the system was Westernized, and the formal norms were reorganized via modern China. In that sense, it can be said that modern calligraphy achieved a kind of 're-Sinicization.'

Works left the alcoves and studies and moved to the walls of exhibition halls. They became massive, were framed, judged, and compared with other works. That format belongs to modern art exhibitions. On the other hand, the objects of copying, the authority of calligraphic styles, and the lineage of brush techniques were organized by Chinese stele rubbings and classics.

Here lies a strange twist in the modernization of Japanese art that cannot be explained by the single word 'Westernization.'

Calligraphy was not left behind by modernization. By bringing a different time, via China, into the Western-style system, it created its own unique modernity.

So, what about dyeing and weaving?

Chapter 3: The Two Systems Embraced by Dyeing and Weaving

Until the early modern period, dyeing was fundamentally a production system linked to clothing, social status, production regions, division of labor, and patrons, existing in a different circuit from the autonomous works of individual artists in the modern sense.

Techniques such as Yuzen, stencil dyeing, and shibori were, before being means of free individual expression, tied to their intended use, materials, the division of labor among artisans, regional industries, and the bodies that wore them.

In the modern era, dyeing entered exhibitions as 'works of art'.

The establishment of the Art and Craft Department at the Teiten Exhibition in 1927 solidified the institutional foundation for dyeing to be publicly judged and evaluated as works bearing the names of their creators. Dyed works were submitted to exhibitions, selected as the artist's creation, and compared with other works.

Meanwhile, in the postwar period, the cultural property protection system institutionalized dyeing from a different perspective.

What is certified there is not just the finished work. It is the body that has highly mastered 'skills'—such as Yuzen, stencil dyeing, and tsumugi weaving—and transmits them to the next generation.

The common term 'Living National Treasure' indicates not only an honor for an individual artist but also the fact that the state has institutionalized the body that preserves and transmits techniques.

Dyeing thus came to live within two systems simultaneously.

One is the system of modern art: artist names, works, exhibitions, judging, and awards. The other is the system of cultural property protection: materials, processes, expertise, transmission, and holders.

In painting, the finished work is, in principle, the center of historical description. In contrast, in dyeing, the body of the technique that made the work possible serves as the basis of value, alongside the work itself.

The fact that Kunihiko Moriguchi is a Living National Treasure while pursuing geometric, modernist forms embodies this duality.

His work is not in the 'middle' between tradition and modernity.

The thinking of graphic design, creation as an individual artist, the techniques of Yuzen, and the cultural property protection system are all operating simultaneously within a single artist.

Chapter 4: Gatherings Determine the Names of History

Here, I would like to return once more to the Kera Art Association.

Kera criticized the system of Nihonga, introduced foreign materials, and sought to break the conventions of the art world. Its works were later historicized in the context of 'Avant-Garde Nihonga' or 'Contemporary Art'.

Moriguchi graduated from the Nihonga department and, after studying design in Paris, moved on to Yuzen. His works also deal with issues common to postwar art and design, such as geometry, repetition, planar composition, and the intersection of East and West.

Even so, Moriguchi entered a different history than Kera. The Japan Traditional Art Crafts Exhibition, dyeing and weaving, Yuzen, Important Intangible Cultural Property. I do not mean to say that their forms are the same. The purpose of production, the attitude toward materials, and the venues for presentation are all different.

However, what is called 'avant-garde' and what is called 'traditional' is not determined solely by the appearance of the work.

Which group one belonged to. Which exhibition one submitted to. Who judged it. Which museum collected it. Which catalog it was recorded in, and which field of researchers discussed it.

The gathering determines the historical name of the work.

People who were in close proximity in the same school, the same city, and the same era were divided, with one group going into contemporary art history and the other into craft history and cultural property history. The distance between a Living National Treasure and a Kera is not only a formal distance but also a distance created by institutions.

The interest of 'Contemporary Dyeing Expression 1991–2025' lies in the fact that this separation is temporarily undone.

The geometric abstractions of Living National Treasures are placed within the same thirty-five-year history as works using photographic dyeing techniques, massive hanging cloths, semi-three-dimensional pieces, and works made of disparate materials.

It is not that the avant-garde and tradition are 'reuniting.' Rather, two worlds that were living in the same era all along are now standing side-by-side on the same wall.

Chapter 5: 1991, Dyeing Creates Its Own Institution

The Seiryukai, the parent organization of the Dyeing and Seiryu Exhibition, was established in 1990. The following year, in 1991, the first exhibition was held at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art.

Its characteristic was that it was not an exhibition organized by a specific faction.

The first exhibition brought together thirty artists, including those from the Nitten, Shinseisaku, Modern Art, Traditional Crafts, and Shinsho Kogei-kai groups, all of whom had different exhibition systems, as well as independent artists. At the time, crossing the boundaries between factions that were otherwise distant was an extremely rare event.

Moreover, the goal was not a one-time exhibition.

The aim was to purchase excellent exhibited works, form a collection, and use that as the core to build a museum specializing in dyeing in Kyoto. This vision was realized with the opening of the Dyeing and Seiryu Museum in 2006. From 2007, the exhibition moved to that venue and was held biennially, reaching its 25th edition in 2025. This retrospective exhibition looks back on those thirty-five years through approximately ninety major works.

Holding juried exhibitions, purchasing works, and preserving them. Based on that collection, establishing a specialized museum, discovering young talent, and telling one's own history through the accumulated works.

This is very similar to what the world of modern art has done.

However, dyeing was not absorbed into existing contemporary art museums. Instead, the dyeing community itself held juried exhibitions, collected works, and built a specialized museum.

The Dyeing and Seiryu Exhibition was not an entrance for dyeing to participate in contemporary art. It was an event where dyeing formed its own art institution.

Of course, these thirty-five years do not represent the entirety of contemporary dyeing. As it is a juried exhibition, the outline of history changes depending on what was selected, what was purchased, and what was left behind. This exhibition is not a neutral general history of contemporary dyeing, but rather a self-portrait drawn by the Dyeing and Seiryu Exhibition institution through the works it chose itself.

However, that does not mean its value is low. A single cultural organization consistently took charge of selection, purchasing, storage, the establishment of a specialized museum, and even generational change, creating its own history. That fact itself deserves attention within the history of Japan's art institutions.

Chapter 6: Living in the Same Era as Contemporary Art, in a Different Place

Walking through the venue in chronological order, it becomes clear that dyeing has been dealing with the same issues as contemporary art, but within a different system.

Abstraction, collage, dismantling of supports, photography, enlargement, three-dimensionalization, spatialization, and social themes.

Michie Yamaguchi's "Galaxy 930327" used cyanotype—a literal photographic technique—on cotton fabric as early as 1993. About thirty years later, Izumi Murota's "Street Material 1.2" also used cyanotype on linen.

Ken Kagajo's "20-Meter Stroke" hangs two pieces of fabric totaling twenty-one meters in length into the space. Jun Mitsuhashi's "Table of Water" combines silk with wood, brass, and stone. Akari Yamashita's "I Can't Breathe," while using wax-resist dyeing, appears continuous with contemporary art in the urgency of its subject matter.

Looking at these, it is easy to say that "dyeing has also become contemporary art."

However, that phrasing implies that contemporary art is placed at the center, and that dyeing has approached it from the outside.

In reality, hasn't dyeing been living through the same era as contemporary art, within a different system and community?

When photography became an issue of art, there were also images created by light sensitivity within dyeing. When works left the wall and entered the space, fabric also hung, overlapped, and stood up. When war, disaster, the body, and memory became subjects of contemporary art, dyed works also addressed those issues.

They did not do the same things in the same way. Dyeing had its own body. Applying wax. Blocking with paste. Soaking. Washing. Unraveling. Sewing. Layering. Transferring. Putting dye into fibers, keeping it out of certain places, and taking time to bring an image into being.

Dyeing did not imitate contemporary art. It passed through the same time—the contemporary—using a different body.

Chapter 7: At the venue, I only used the language of painting

However, at the venue, I myself was unable to see this parallel world well.

Looking back at my notes, I wrote "looks like a war painting" for Mitsuo Takaya's "Noah," "altarpiece?" for Masafumi Honda's "Savant Syndrome HD," "looks like the Nabis. Might be completely wrong, though" for Mika Toba's "Haze," and "looks like a photograph seen at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum" for Toshichika Gamon's "Portrait of family."

I also left a scribble saying, "What is this, an abstract painting?" None of these associations are entirely wrong.

"Noah" places a large black boat on a solid yellow background. The hull is a dark, ink-like mass, the rigging is as thin as wire, and a square consisting only of an outline sinks beneath the boat. Sensing hints of evacuation and catastrophe in the theme of the ark, I wrote, "looks like a war painting."

"Savant Syndrome HD" features horizontal gold-leaf panels placed on the left and right, with a human body protruding from a vertical panel in the center, becoming semi-three-dimensional. The symmetrical arrangement, the gold background, the central body—associating it with a triptych is not unnatural.

But when I read the caption, the association slips away halfway through.

The support for "Noah" is Shinshu tsumugi silk, and that heavy black is created by wax-resist dyeing using acid dyes and 'sando-guro' (triple black).

The materials for 'Savant Syndrome HD' are Kumohada mashi paper, Usu-Mino paper, imitation gold leaf, polyester fabric, cotton fabric, and pigments, combined with screen printing and thermal transfer. While the term 'altarpiece' may reach the composition, it cannot explain the materials and processes that bring the work into being.

It was the same reason I thought 'Portrait of family' was a contemporary photograph.

The technique column lists 'layered dye on tulle.' The image is not printed on a single piece of fabric. By layering dyed tulle, the image, which resembles a family photograph, gains density. What appeared to be a photograph was not a single surface, but a layering of multiple thin membranes.

Regarding Mika Toba's 'Kagero' (Heat Haze), I wrote, 'It looks like the Nabis. Though that might be completely wrong.' Black lines stitch through planes of yellow, blue, and red like city alleys or railway tracks. While indicating perspective, the entire surface stands out strongly as a single decorative plane. I believe that association arose from that flatness.

However, the support is Hakusan tsumugi silk, and the technique is katazome (stencil dyeing). While I was connecting the finished surface to styles in art history, I was not looking at how the density of this city was assembled onto the fabric through the process of stencil dyeing.

My metaphors were about half right regarding 'what the work looks like.' However, they were completely off when it came to the kind of body and process from which those images were born.

And what is important is that this failure is not merely a product of my ignorance. It is also because the work was standing in the place of painting.

Chapter 8: Gaining the Place of Painting, and the Price Paid

Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art, Main Building, North Corridor, Second Floor.

White walls and polished wooden floors stretch into the distance, with large rectangular works lined up on both sides. Seen from the entrance, it looks like a retrospective of postwar painting. The works face the white walls directly, and are viewed with one surface as the front.

This frontality is an achievement that the Some-Seiryu Exhibition has repeated and secured for dyeing over the course of thirty-five years.

To hang on a museum wall not as a sample of kimono design or craftsmanship, but as an autonomous work by an individual artist. The Some-Seiryu Exhibition has created that space for dyeing.

That is why the audience views dyeing as if they were viewing painting. War paintings, altarpieces, the Nabis, photography, abstract painting.

That was a failure of my way of seeing, but at the same time, it was the result of the institutional success of the Some-Seiryu Exhibition. It is precisely because dyeing gained the same wall space as painting that the audience has come to view dyeing through the language of art history.

However, when you approach the work, a different body appears.

The edges of the fabric are slightly curled. There are seams. The threads are raised. The colors change depending on the angle of the light. It is not a surface closed off like a board, but one that hangs, is translucent, and has overlapping planes.

From a distance it looks like a painting, but up close it returns to being fabric.

The fact that Moriguchi's geometry is yuzen, and that Takaya's black ship is dyed on Shinshu tsumugi, lies within this duality. Dyeing has passed through the place of painting with a body that is not painting.

Having said that, I have one complaint: I wanted to see the back.

This does not mean that the 'truth' of the work lies on the reverse side. How far do the dyes penetrate into the fibers? How do the resist-dyed areas appear on the back? How much difference is there in the intensity of color between the front and the back? How far do images created by pigments, gold leaf, and thermal transfer penetrate the support, and where do they stop?

I wanted to confirm those differences with my own eyes.

Shigenobu Kimura, the first director of the Some-Seiryu-kan, stated that the Western term 'surface design' could not sufficiently capture the essence of dyeing. This is because dyeing is not merely about placing a design on a surface, but an act of color entering into the fabric or paper.

If we take Kimura's words as a guide, the difference between the front and back becomes a concrete clue for considering how far the color has entered the support and where it has stopped.

In painting exhibitions, the reverse side of a work is usually not an object of appreciation. However, in dyeing, the difference between the front and back itself can speak to the technique.

Of course, it is not possible to display every work on both sides. Some works are backed, and there are preservation issues. Contemporary dyeing involves not only the penetration of dyes but also the adhesion of pigments, gold leaf, transfer, bonding, sewing, and combinations with different materials.

That is precisely why a few pieces would have sufficed. Works where the dye penetrates deep into the fibers. Works where the image is fixed on the surface. Works where the image emerges through the layering of multiple membranes. These should have been taken off the wall and shown alongside photographs of the reverse side, mirrors, test-dyed fabrics, and process samples.

If that had been done, the technical terms—wax resist, stencil dyeing, printing, and transfer—would have become an experience of seeing rather than knowledge written in a caption.

This exhibition carefully narrated the institutional history of the Some-Seiryu Exhibition through digital commentary. On the other hand, there were few clues to confirm where the physicality of the technique remains in the finished work.

That is also the price paid for liberating dyeing from being a technical sample and placing it front and center as a work of art. How will the next exhibition show what has become difficult to see in order to gain the status of a painting?

The dissatisfaction of 'wanting to see the back' is not merely a request for appreciation. It is a demand to prevent the other modernity created by dyeing from being subsumed solely into the frontality of painting.

Conclusion: As Another Art History

Modern Japanese art did not progress at a single speed or in a single direction.

Within the institutions of schools, exhibitions, and museums established by the state, Nihonga and Western-style painting continued their negotiations with Western art.

Calligraphy, while using the modern forms of public exhibitions and wall displays, reorganized its formal norms through Chinese classics via the Qing dynasty stele studies brought by Yang Shoujing.

Dyeing, while entering art exhibitions as works with named authors, carried within it the physicality of techniques such as Yuzen, stencil dyeing, wax resist, and shibori, as well as the system of Living National Treasures.

And in 1991, the Some-Seiryu Exhibition gathered artists who had been divided by factions, purchased their works, formed a collection, and established a specialized museum.

These are not instances of delayed or incomplete modernization. They are multiple modernities, each incorporating different pasts and authorities while using the same modern vessels.

Kunihiko Moriguchi and the KERA Art Association vividly demonstrate this divergence.

Both were around the Nihonga department of the Kyoto City University of Arts, during roughly the same era. One broke the system of Nihonga and entered the history of avant-garde art. The other advanced into Yuzen and became a Living National Treasure.

However, standing before 'III-1-'92,' the two terms 'avant-garde' and 'tradition' begin to look less like differences in the forms themselves, and more like names retroactively assigned by the groups and institutions to which they belonged.

When I entered the venue, the question I was posing to the works was, 'What kind of painting does this resemble?'

After leaving the venue, the question changed. Which group selected this work, which institution gave it value, which body of technique produced this image, and which history carried it to this point?

Dyeing was not lagging behind outside of contemporary art. It was running through the same era, possessing different groups, different institutions, and different bodies.

'Contemporary Dyeing Expression 1991–2025' was an exhibition where those parallel times intersected in a single gallery. What was visible there was not the periphery of contemporary art. It was another history of Japanese art, created by different institutions and bodies.

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