Fu Qiumeng Fine Art is pleased to announce the opening of the new show Hisao Hanafusa: Nothing but Recollection.  Hisao Hanafusa (b. 1937) was born in Miyakonojo, a city at the southernmost tip of Japan. After graduating from the  Kyoto University of Fine Arts, he moved to New York in 1963. His career as an artist in New York witnessed many successes. Most notably, his works have appeared in four group exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum. Hanafusa is both a traditional craftsman and a contemporary artist. His work encompasses inspirations drawn from vastly different realms and cultures. This solo exhibition takes a retrospective view of Hanafusa’s career by showcasing his paintings from the  1960s and 1970s, as well as a number of his recent works. It also includes a number of the artist’s traditional handcrafted woodwork. These works employ an ancient Japanese joinery technique that binds wood without nails or adhesive to achieve a truly smooth and balanced finish. By juxtaposing the artist’s painting and woodwork, this exhibition presents  Hanafusa’s combined aesthetics of classic elegance and contemporary innovation. This show will be on view at 65 East  80th Street from April 21 to June 19, 2021. 

 Hanafusa’s paintings can be roughly divided into two groups: his steel paintings of the late twentieth century, and his gestural paintings started in the 2000s. Works of the first group, mostly created with steel tubes and paint on canvas,  epitomized aesthetic strategies of mid-century Japanese and American contemporary art. Later in his career, Hanafusa believed that painting carries knowledge innate to the human mind. “I believe that all humans have uchuiden or ‘cosmic  memory’,” he wrote, “My work is an exploration of the mysteries of my own uchuiden (cosmic memory).” Guided by this idea, his later work series “Uchuiden Kioku” feature all-over compositions created with silver aluminum paint. These later works also involve a temporal dimension. As the silver paint ages over the years, it changes into dark red, yellow, or brown. Works of the earlier group are mostly restrained in visual expression, sharing many similarities with mono-ha and minimalism; the later works highlight the materiality of paint, generating marks reminiscent of gestural brushwork. What connects these two groups of works is Hanafusa’s continuing challenge of the boundary of painting. 

 The title of this exhibition, Nothing but Recollection, is drawn from Plato’s Meno, in which Socrates, in a dialogue recorded by Plato, introduced the idea that “seeking and learning are in fact nothing but recollection”. The two philosophers think that the human mind has access to certain concepts and beliefs before it is born. The process of learning certain parts of human knowledge, especially that not dependent upon sensory experience, is a process of remembering. Hanafusa’s above-mentioned idea of human beings embodying cosmic memory resonates with the philosophers’ theory of learning. For the viewership of his paintings, Hanafusa does not prioritize sensory perception. He does not want to have complete control of all aspects of his work and prefers to paint in a spontaneous manner. The final paintings can be seen as traces or records of his thoughts and actions.  

 Hanafusa is both a carpenter and an artist. Since the 1960s, he has been specializing in making traditional Japanese furniture, which emphasizes the mobilization of the natural quality of wood. In the making of joinery, for example,  Japanese artisans have long been employing a technique that fits timber beams together like complex puzzle pieces, without using glue, nails, or other fasteners. This requires the artisans to be highly sensitive to the contour, texture, and other physical qualities of wood. Hanafusa tends to endow the materials he uses with a human-like agency. For example, he once  described his furniture-making with the following words, “First you must look at the wood to understand it, then you  must feel it while it’s in the shop, and finally you must hear it when it is sawed.” Deep insights into natural materials not only guide Hanafusa’s furniture-making, but also his art practice. His paintings, especially his later works, are indexes of nature, the passing of time, and human beings’ perception of them. 

 In 1969, Eleanor Ward the owner of the legendary gallery Stable Gallery debuted Hanafusa’s first solo show in NYC and introduced his works to Peggy Guggenheim and Thomas Messer. Since then his paintings have appeared in four group exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum during Thomas Messer’s time at the museum. Hanafusa’s artworks are in the collection of a number of art institutions, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the San Francisco  Museum of Modern Art. 

 As for the artist’s carpentry work, his furniture had also been praised by prestigious designers and architects. Hanafusa was cosigned to design customized furniture for the Pritzker family, Eileen Fisher, Steve Shiffman(CEO of Calvin Klein  2014-2019), Brioni, Ghiora Aharoni, and relevant reports have appeared in the New York Times and New York Magazine.  Also, this 2M view documentary introduced the unique joinery technique which Hanafusa incorporates in his carpentry-making process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7708E1bmoxc. 

 Fu Qiumeng Fine Art is a New York-based art space. By offering a unique perspective on the relationship between artistic creation and the collecting of art, it serves as an interdisciplinary research and development platform at the interface of art, business, and society. 

 In the realm of global contemporary art, Fu Qiumeng Fine Art aims to reposition Asian contemporary art. It primarily focuses on the breaking down of the bifurcation between traditional aesthetics and contemporary art and on the reconfiguration of the cultural division between East and West. We believe that this will help us retrace the past, envision the  future, and, most importantly, redefine the present.