Traces of Memory

The works gathered here do not form a single series in any strict sense, yet newspapers, sleep, solitary figures, family images, and the faint pressure of the outside world recur from work to work. Together they suggest one persistent line in Akeyama’s practice, where memory stays close to the body and returns in altered forms over time.

From a 2022 Interview
Edited for clarity from the original spoken Japanese.

The people I saw wrapped in newspapers, and the families lying down inside railway stations, were not simply foreign scenes.

They began to overlap with memories from my own childhood and with the years I worked for my mother. I think the Napping works emerged from that overlap.

From a 2022 Interview
Edited for clarity from the original spoken Japanese.

My mother was someone who worked for many years while raising her children. When I was young, seeing her life, I wanted someday to build a house for her.

Watching her grow older, I felt that her living presence had to be painted while it was still before me. That was why I asked her to come to the studio and sit for me.

How the Motif Returns

The interview excerpts above suggest that newspapers, sleeping bodies, family images, and distant scenes do not function as isolated motifs in Akeyama’s work. Rather, they return in altered forms, carrying traces of lived experience, travel, labor, and memory.

In the Napping works, newspapers remain physical things: bedding, wrapping, support, and surface. They keep the body close to the outside world even in rest.

Across the other works gathered here, that relation does not simply disappear. Even when the newspaper itself is no longer present, something of the same tension remains. In Mother and Child - H, Boy in the Rapeseed Blossoms, Flowerdoll, The Girl with the Flower Bird, Distant Hometown, and Early Spring / White Path, inward life and the outside world continue to meet in changed forms. What returns is not one fixed symbol, but a recurring way of keeping memory and the world close to one another.

Commentary
Genichiro Inokuma (Japanese painter; 1902–1993), 1990 — Excerpt (selected sentences)

 “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.”

  “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.”

Source
Genichiro Inokuma, “On Ouyoshi Akeyama’s Work,” in the exhibition catalog Ouyoshi Akeyama Oil Paintings (Nihonbashi Mitsukoshi Main Store, 6th Floor Gallery, 1990).

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