In Japanese artist Kumagai Minoru’s work, art meets philosophy

Offering a rare glimpse into a deeply contemplative artistic vision rooted in Japanese aesthetics and philosophy is acclaimed Japanese artist Kumagai Minoru’s exhibition, underway at Kalamkaar, Bikaner House, in Delhi. ‘Earthsongs From Japan’ marks his first debut presentation in India and comprises his paintings on paper.

Born in 1941 in Kyoto, Kumagai studied Japanese painting at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts, later evolving into a distinguished designer and globally exhibited artist. Over decades of travel and artistic exploration, he has developed a unique visual language that reflects humanity’s enduring relationship with nature.

The exhibition features 50 works that capture ephemeral moments, natural light, and shifting perspectives — poetic meditations on interdependence between human existence and the natural world.

Central to Kumagai’s practice is his distinctive technique that he developed called ‘Saihaku’. This innovative style combines gold, silver, coloured, and holographic foils as foundational surfaces, use of traditional Japanese pigments and acrylic paints. This technique uses various types of foil — gold leaf, silver leaf, holographic foil, coloured foil, etc. as a base, and then incorporates traditional Japanese painting pigments and acrylic paints to effectively showcase the brilliance of the foil.

Through this fusion of tradition and modernity, Kumagai creates luminous compositions that emphasize texture, brilliance, and depth. As the artist explains: “While respecting traditional Japanese painting techniques, I express myself through modern, innovative techniques and use a variety of foil materials to create a new style of ‘Saihaku.’”

Curator Uma Nair says Kumagai reinterprets the traditional landscape through the adoption of modern abstract expressionist techniques woven into Impressionism. “While the middle/top ground sometimes outlines a magnificent view of eternal mountains, the background is shrouded in mist, contributing to a new aesthetic perspective that explores a spatial arrangement of both the virtual and the real. Enriched with woven colours of layering, these compositions take on various gradations of deepened reds, sometimes russets and sometimes moss greens and deep blues as its primary palette, embellished with brushstrokes as well as subtle smudges.”

“Within the small vistas of a sea of colour, the compositions resemble a majestic vision of sunrise above the waters. Kumagai diverts our gaze from a representational narrative, his alternative use of both dense and light lines are interwoven in a cross-hatch abstraction which creates a powerful imagery of landscapes. Kumagai has an internal universe of deep emotions that is embedded within the calligraphic-like brushwork unique to Eastern cultures. Furthermore, his exposure to many international masters gives him a unique understanding of a masterful use of creating rich layers and textures of modern landscapes, to signify to us a creative fusion of aesthetic values upheld in both the East as well as the West,” she says.

At view at Kalamkaar, Bikaner House, New Delhi from February 25 to March 1.