Tear, paste, and make

B N Goswamy

“Art is a line around your thoughts.”

— Gustav Klimt

Among the many delights that the art of Japan yields is the art form called sumi-e: brush painting in black ink. The form is ancient, and native to Japan, and great works have been created in it, including by those who began to copy it in the West when the art of Japan came to be known there. But without its spiritual under-pinnings there in the West, it remained more surface than depth. The depth in it — the austere brevity, the thought in which it was rooted, the sheer elegance of the brush-strokes — had always come from Zen Buddhism. It was an art of discipline, monks trained in the concepts and practice of concentration, clarity, and simplicity, finding in it the ideal form. For centuries, it kept on being practised in secluded, serene corners.

The art given the name of chigiri-e, also from Japan and around which the piece I am writing moves, is different, however. It stands almost in contrast, in fact, to sumi-e. The term comes from the word “chigiru”, meaning to tear or shred, to which “e”, meaning ‘picture’, is added.

Pictures made from pasting pieces of torn paper together, then, is what chigiri-e is. Essentially thus it falls in the category of collage — from papier colle, the French term for paper glued or put together — the technique in which some very distinguished work was produced in Europe: by the great Cubist painters, for example.Chigiri-e, at least in Japan, employed, at one time, only one kind of handmade, hand-dyed paper called washi, and only gum made from seaweed was used for pasting purposes. But with times things changed, even in Japan.

All kinds of paper, some torn from printed materials like magazines and newspapers, others just dyed afresh, became grist to the mill of chigiri-e artists, and seaweed gum became nearly a thing of the past. But this did not mean an end of the creative spirit, for even after the changes that came about, in fact having absorbed those changes with elan, some very seductive work continued to be produced. It was clear that the kind of quiet withdrawal, that reference to the silences of heart, that Zen masters working in the sumi-e technique were able to achieve, was not reflected in chigiri-e collages: in it there seemed, on the other hand, to be a longing for recapturing all the beauty that was around you, in nature, in flora and fauna, in mountains and rocks.

There goes around in fact a story — almost certainly apocryphal — that underscores this desire to savour what is left of beauty through creating this kind of art out of virtually nothing. The story is recent. It speaks of the great devastation that the atom bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the Second World War wrought. It was carnage of the kind that the human species had never seen before: everything from men to materials was suddenly gone, destroyed, buried, razed to the ground. In the midst of that ravaged landscape, however, some artist found, swirling around, stray pieces of paper, and decided to make art out of these torn, shredded bits. Creativity, nostalgia, a desperate hanging on to the memory of times lost, were the inspiration.

But surely chigiri-e is not as recent as this. Even if one discounts the exaggerated statement that it is as old as paper, there are credible references to the fact that it was practised during the Heian period, anywhere between the eighth and the 12th centuries, and was not necessarily an art for the common folk: it had the patronage of the royalty and the nobility of those times. Value was sought to be added to chigiri-e works by the incorporation of calligraphy, mostly centred on poetry. The materials being fragile, not many works from that period seem to have survived. But that there is history to the art seems undeniable. What we see now is the result of the art moving forward with a second wind, as it were. It is astonishing how many practitioners of the art there are in America today: people who travelled to Japan, brought examples of it from there, and then decided to go into it on their own.

The occasion for me to enter the world of chigiri-e at this point of time is an exhibition that I saw on a recent visit to Delhi. There they were in the annexe of the India International Centre: a whole range of works in the chigiri-e style and done not by a Japanese artist but a gifted Indian: Jyotirmoy Ray. What added to my surprise was the fact that Jyotirmoy Ray was not a professional artist, in the sense that we normally use that term: he was and continues to be a steel technologist, who was trained in the United States, but spent nearly two decades working in Japan where he — by natural inclination, and through association with his artist wife, an artist at heart — picked up the essentials of the technique. In his work, he says, he has deviated a bit from tradition by using snippets of paper that are not torn or shredded but cut and clipped from all kinds of publications. He has also been keen on expanding the repertoire of images, occasionally bringing in, for instance, human figures. But, all in all, there is nature, and yet more nature, that one sees in his work. Lakes and hills, the sun and clouds, birds of different feather, and flowers of every description – some observed, others imagined – make up the body of his work. However, these are not straightforward views of scenes observed, but constructed with subtlety and with a sharp awareness of textures. Leaves blossom with colours and a sense of freedom rises like gentle wisps of fragrance from the work.

All of this could easily be spoken of as outside of the area of ‘high’ art’, or as being too decorative and excessively ‘sweet’. But as birds take to wing and mossy rocks at lake-shores seem to whisper into one another’s ears, one knows that one has moved into a different world. A world seen not through the windows of eyes but from those of the mind.