“Power borrowing,” or jieli in early China thought, homographic to chakuriki in Japanese, is a pan-East Asian philosophical concept. It gestures a spontaneous ease and graceful effortlessness one would enjoy through utilizing others’ powers to achieve desired effects. As an artist and a practicing carpenter, Hanafusa uses natural elements—for example light, shadows, humidity, and gravity—to stimulate and explore his material’s spontaneous happening. However, the experiments are conducted in studio circumstances under his delicate control. He tinkers with the boundaries between action, non-action, and reaction, and brings out the inherent beauty of this process through his enacted, enchanting mediums. Uchuiden Kioku (cosmic inherent memory) expresses his feeling for the obscure memories of the primordial cosmos through which he believes everyone is interconnected. The undefined figures in Fifth Dimension further arouse observers’ psychic resonances with paint, as well as an intensified sense of self-consciousness. Hanafusa collaborates with nature through the material, and with it, attains an alchemy that bewilders materiality.

“I didn’t do the work; Nature did it,” repeated Hanafusa throughout our preparatory interview for this exhibition. Decades have passed since his tube paintings first earned him fame as a Minimalist artist in the 1960s and 1970s. From September 14 to December 17, 2022, Fu Qiumeng Fine Art in New York City will showcase the artist’s recent paintings from the Uchuiden Kioku (cosmic inherent memory) series and the Fifth Dimension series, which he has been working on since the early 2000s. Titled Hisao Hanafusa: Borrowing Nature’s Powers, this exhibition re-introduces Hanafusa through the East Asian philosophical concept of borrowing Nature’s strength and making it one’s own. Arguably, the method of using natural elements—light, shadow, humidity, and gravity, to name just a few—to complete a work has been present in his practice since the 1960s. However, it has been overshadowed by the everchanging discourses of past twentieth-century art movements that the 85-year-old Japanese artist took part in, without wholly being part of; or, put retrospectively in Derrida’s term, “a sort of participation without belonging.” This exhibition rethinks Hanafusa as an individual artist at the methodological level. By distilling the mechanism of his engagement with his materials as borrowing from Nature (chakuriki in Japanese; jieli in Chinese), this exhibition offers the audience the intrinsic, and essentially ecosophical, way of understanding Hanafusa.  

The exhibition is curated by Dr. Tingting Xu, the Arnaldo Momigliano Postdoctoral Scholar in the Division of Humanities at The University of Chicago. An exhibition catalog will be published by Wùgé, including Dr. Xu’s introductory essay and her interview with Hanafusa.