Texts & Appraisals

Presented here are a brief but powerful text by Genichiro Inokuma, an archival record of Churyo Sato’s encounter with Napping-C, and two essays by Yasumasa Suetake, who followed and supported Akeyama’s work over many years.

1. Genichiro Inokuma on Ouyoshi Akeyama (1990)

Introduction

Genichiro Inokuma (1902–1993), a leading figure in modern Japanese painting who worked in New York for nearly two decades, was also someone Akeyama deeply admired from an early stage in his life as a painter. Their connection began when the young Akeyama visited Inokuma’s Tokyo studio and showed him his work. A short but striking text by Inokuma was later included in the catalogue for Akeyama’s 1990 exhibition. In it, Inokuma describes Akeyama’s path as a painter as being like “the movement of a glacier.”

Excerpt

“A human figure, darkly set atop a great accumulation of newspapers, sleeps deeply—peaceful, as though bearing the weight of the earth—as if it had forgotten how to move.
A child, properly bundled in a hand-knitted sweater and scarf made with care by his mother, and with a hood pulled on just so, stands in silence, clutching tightly a rattan basket adorned with the face of a great bird. It is such an honest scene that I feel like saying to him, ‘You make quite a model.’


In Akeyama’s work there is a dogged pursuit of what belongs to no one but himself; it advances, little by little—again and again—and looks like the slow movement of a glacier.”


“This is a tremendous asset for an artist.”

Editorial Note

What gives this short text its force is that Inokuma does not praise Akeyama in abstract terms. He responds to concrete details—the pile of newspapers, the sleeping figure, the clothing, the basket—and from them arrives at a wider understanding of Akeyama’s path as a painter. The phrase “the movement of a glacier” remains one of the most concise descriptions of the persistence of his work.

2. Churyo Sato and Napping-C (1987)     

Archival Record

Napping-C was painted in 1987 and received the Excellence Award at the 4th Japan Young Artists Exhibition, following Akeyama’s award at the same exhibition the previous year.

Before the work was submitted, Churyo Sato (1912–2011), one of the leading sculptors of postwar Japan, visited Akeyama’s home and saw the painting in the studio.. A photograph from that time shows Sato standing before Napping-C together with Ouyoshi Akeyama, Akeyama’s wife Masako, and Yasumasa Suetake.

A handwritten postcard later sent by Sato also remains in the archive. In it, Sato wrote that he was moved to encounter the work again at the exhibition, and that, when seen among the other works, it stood out with particular strength. He also offered words of encouragement to Akeyama.

This episode is significant not simply as a personal anecdote, but as an early record of how Napping-C and Akeyama’s newspaper motif were received at the time. The work belongs to a formative moment in Akeyama’s painting, when the image of a sleeping body on newspapers appeared with a raw, urgent force that would later develop into one of his recurring pictorial themes.

3. Yasumasa Suetake on Ouyoshi Akeyama

Introduction

Yasumasa Suetake, former director of Towada City Central Hospital, was one of Akeyama’s most important local supporters and long-term readers of his work. His writings on Akeyama include a 1996 essay centred on the image of magma and a longer 2001 essay addressing family images, Siberian paintings, and the continuity of Akeyama’s practice.

From “A Painter Who Carries Magma: An Essay on Akeyama’s Art” (1996)
Source
Yume Miru Hito, Towada local newspaper, 1996

“Akeyama seems to be someone who carries that magma within him.”

“When Akeyama pursues the human figure in painting, he does not depict what a person is doing. Rather, he seems to seek the human being itself—human existence itself.”

From “Master Painter Ouyoshi Akeyama and ‘Original Landscapes’” (2001)
Source
Yume Miru Hito, Towada local newspaper, October 2001.

Excerpt A | On family and mother-and-child images

“Among the paintings in the ‘Mother’ sequence, the work titled Distant Hometown shows a mother seated on a severe rock. The distant horizontal landscape of mountains and rivers seems suited to the twilight of her final years. Filled with deep maternal tenderness and carrying something of the character of a religious painting, it seems to invite us toward an age that believed in God with simplicity.

In the spring of 1996, upon turning fifty, Akeyama received the Grand Prize at the 16th Tenri Biennale for Mother and Child - III, part of his mother series. It is a large work, full of strict composition and pictorial tension: in a dim warehouse where bundles of old English-language newspapers are piled up, a strong mother lies down, and between her knees a boy holds an old leather stuffed toy.

Since Akeyama had lost his mother the previous year, it is natural to see the boy as Akeyama himself. The fundamental tone of the painting is filled with deep sorrow. Yet this sorrow goes beyond the personal and reaches toward a universal emotion: the absurdity of death and the grief of losing one who is loved. In the bond with the mother who raised him and shared so many years with him, I also see Akeyama’s original landscape.”

Excerpt B1 | On Girl of Khabarovsk - A

“This painting shows a life-sized girl seated on a crude chair under a pale light, and its simple composition carries strong tension. Before beginning an oil painting, Akeyama customarily spends many days preparing the ground, making the canvas as smooth and solid as marble. That practice gives the single gray-white background a heavy presence, while bringing out the floral pattern of the girl’s plain printed dress.”

Excerpt B2 | On Khabarovsk Wilderness

“Only a slight golden afterglow is visible on the horizon, while pitch-dark clouds hang down in the center of the picture. Yet if one looks closely, the blue sky above those clouds is touched by the setting sun, and several birds are flying there. This must be the Siberia that Akeyama saw with his own eyes while standing in the open fields of Khabarovsk. Although he had continued to paint human figures, I felt that, before the original landscape of Siberia, he had at last opened his eyes to landscape painting. It is a splendid landscape. There is in it an eye that gazes steadily at Siberia.”

Editorial Note

Suetake’s writings are valuable for both the breadth and closeness of their view. Writing from a position near to Akeyama’s life and career, he relates the work to difficult childhood experience, the formative importance of the African journey, and the long continuity of the practice, while reading the family images with unusual attention to their gravity and emotional weight. His image of magma gives concise form to the inward force he perceived across that development.

Further appraisals and documentary texts on Ouyoshi Akeyama will be added here over time.