Tatsuo Kawaguchi

Tatsuo Kawaguchi (河口龍夫, Kawaguchi Tatsuo, born in 1940, Kobe Japan) is a Japanese multidisciplinary artist, whose practice often involves the use of objects and the investigation of materials.

After studying painting at Tama Art University, Kawaguchi's diverse oeuvre has included drawing, sculpture, installation, photography, and video.

Born in Kobe, Kawaguchi studied painting at Tama University of Fine Art, Tokyo, where he graduated with a BFA in 1962.

From 1962 to 1965 he primarily created non-figurative paintings.

His compositions are structured by bands of alternating colors, upon which the artist painted repetitive geometric forms.

Certain paintings, especially those executed in black and white, show Kawaguchi's interest in optical illusions, as he arranges patterns and colors to suggest new shapes within the composition.

Art critic Akira Tatehata describes these early paintings as "illusive," arguing that the artist's taste for the conceptual can already be sensed: "His mechanical repetitions of circles, triangles, stripes and other sign units, while light and rhythmical, even humorous, are at the same time quite inorganically austere, decidedly imparting a chill to the pictorial space."

During this period, Kawaguchi also engaged in some sculptural work.

While teaching at a middle school in 1964, a student who had cast his hand in plaster struggled to remove it from the hardening mass.

The artist kept and subsequently painted the mold with the imprint of the boy's hand, considering it a "monument taken from the student's life, an experience of human growth and time never seen again."

He also co-founded the Group "i", a Kobe-based artistic collective, in 1965.

Kawaguchi's early work explored visual perception, principally through the use of objects and mirrors.

His 1967 series, Interrelation, presents vibrant vinyl wires coiling around each other, mounted on plywood.

This series may be understood as an early manifestation of the artist's interest in exploring relationships (kankei), illustrated through the criss-crossing lines of the wires.

The illusionary element that revealed itself in Kawaguchi's early paintings took on a sculptural form in the late sixties.

In 1967, he created a series of moving works in which a three-dimensional geometric form (a cylinder or a cone) was placed next to a two-dimensional shape (a triangle or a rectangle) in a transparent box.

The two-dimensional shape was mechanically spun on its axis by a high-powered motor.

Animated by this movement, the two-dimensional form could be temporarily perceived of as three-dimensional, like the neighboring solid form.

Mirrors became an important element of Kawaguchi's work exploring illusion.

Throughout 1967 and 1968, he attached halved, solid geometric forms (semi-cylinders, semi-cones, semi-spheres) to mirrors mounted vertically upon plywood.

The image reflected in the mirror thus gave the appearance of the form in its entirety.

The image would also transform depending on the position of the viewer.

He later employed half-mirrors to further play with perceptions of light by introducing darkness, creating "a continuous space of real and virtual images."

Kawaguchi's mirror constructions culminated in the 1968 work Two Mirrors (Between Mirror and Mirror).

Focusing purely on the mirror as an object, the artist bound two mirrors together with rope, their reflective sides facing each other, "confining pure space to an infinitely repeated mirror image."

Kawaguchi's mirror works were notably presented at the spring 1968 exhibition organized by Junzō Ishiko and Yusuke Nakahara, Tricks and Vision: Stolen Eyes, at the Tokyo Gallery and the Muramatsu Gallery.

Kawaguchi's Interrelation of Objet and Image in Infinite Space; or the Hollow Woman was shown at the Kobe exhibition Contemporary Space '68 - Light and Environment. The artist presented a plaster copy of the head and torso of the Venus de Milo.

Fragmented into horizontal segments, these were then mounted in boxes lined with mirrors and half-mirrors, with the full ensemble illuminated by a black light.

The viewer thus perceived the interior and the exterior of the sculpture as well as its multiple reflections within a seemingly infinite space.

Kawaguchi commented: "In today's world where objects become images and images objects, I emphasize the need for new thinking based on the mutual relationships and interplay between objects and images."

After 1970, he began using the word "relation" (関係, kankei) in the titles of his works.

Kawaguchi seeks to put on display the fragile relationships between the visible and the invisible that create the world around us.

The artist intends for his works - which have employed both man-made elements such as lightbulbs or motors, as well as natural elements like stone, wood, seeds and metals - to be perceived of as perpetual works in progress, transforming with time.

Environmental anxiety has also informed the development of Kawaguchi's "relation" works.

After the Chernobyl disaster, the artist has continuously enveloped various objects, such as seeds, plants, soil, or tools, in lead, a material that protects against radiation.

Kawaguchi's work has featured in major international exhibitions and has been associated by art historians with artistic movements such as land art, minimalism and Mono-ha.

Kawaguchi has also been identified as belonging to the loosely-affiliated Gainen-ha (Conceptual School), alongside Yutaka Matsuzawa, Jiro Takamatsu, Kazuo Okazaki, Saburo Muraoka (with whom he collaborated in 1973), Isamu Wakabayashi, and Aiko Miyawaki.

Kawaguchi was awarded the First Iue Culture Prize for Art and Culture in 1974 as well as the Prize of Japan Arts Foundation in 2008.

He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Tsukuba, Institute of Art and Design.

He lives and works in Chiba City.