WATANI International
8 March 2009
For 15 years the Japanese painter Kazzu Kinoshita has been painting scenes from Egypt. “My paintings are all about bringing the imperative past to the future,” he says. “I have called this series of paintings of Egypt ‘Nokosareshimo-nohe’, meaning ‘to their posterity’”.
Kinoshita recently held an exhibition of his works in Cairo. Visitors were delighted to see their pharaonic heritage depicted against a backdrop of modern-day scenes.
“Twenty years have passed since I started painting (Nokosareshimo-nohe), Mr Kinoshita told Watani. “‘To their posterity’ does not denote our heritage, but us who are actually alive at this moment. The heritage talks to me and asks how would I bring the imperative past into the future.”
Past, present and future
“By retracing the thousands of years of Egyptian history and encountering nature and space time,” Mr Kinoshita said. “I did paintings with specific messages. Then I felt the urge to show my art in Egypt to Egyptians. Thanks to the Japan Foundation, this dream has become a reality. I selected 25 of my best works to show in Egypt.”
It comes as a stunning surprise that Mr Kinoshita never lived in Egypt. He merely visited it with his wife some 10 times of eight to 14 days’ stay, cruising the Nile between Luxor and Aswan, and visiting Qena, Dendara, Esna, and Abu-Simbel. He made a lot of sketches and took numerous photographs. “My heart was taken by the beauty, and greatness of the monuments, and the splendid scenery of Egypt,” Back in Japan, he says, he “put his imagination to work.”
“Apart from Egypt,” Mr Kinoshita said, “I visited China, Greece and the Netherlands but, in all honesty, Egypt was different for me because there I definitely felt the connection between the ancient past, the present and future. In Egypt I felt I was watching the same moon, sun, or stars that the ancient people watched.”
Coexistence
Mr Kinoshita’s paintings are in oils, and the visitor to his exhibition is bound to notice that he predominantly uses yellows, reds, browns and blues. “I think the warm colours reflect my sense of the hot climate of Egypt, and represent my first paintings of the country. Then I visited Lake Nasser by boat, and was absolutely impressed by the magnificent scenes of the stars at night. Suddenly the blue colour imposed itself as a very important component of my artwork, not only in case of Aswan scenery, but all over—in the pyramids and sphinx as well.”
But even before his Egypt experience, Mr Kinoshita was concerned with depicting coexistence; he painted seashells together with trees, just to indicate the possibility of their coexistence throughout time. Egypt strongly contributed to developing the artist’s work to stress the coexistence of time—old and modern.