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Nintai-Patience – Japanese Photography by Frauke Eigen


Prof. Dr. Ulrich Schneider




deutsche Version


Nr. 4 Hakage I

Hakage Nr.I

Japan

It requires a fair amount of patience in order to find the world’s best paper shop in Tokyo’s Bunkyo quarter. Paper Nao was the name Naoki Sakamoto gave his enterprise, which enjoys an exceptional reputation in international artists’ and restorers’ circles, three decades ago. On just a few square metres on the first floor of a small commercial building the stunning products of Japanese manufacturers are assembled, suitable for watercolours and ink painting, and not least for calligraphy. Of course Sakamoto also sells the famous brushes, from the broadest to precision products suitable for the very finest miniatures.

 

However, Sakamoto also incorporates manmade artefacts into his papers. He regularly travels to Nepal and scrapes the surfaces off the typical, colourful clay houses in order to mix the scrapings into his paper slurry. This produces lively colour structures with their own unique smell: it is exactly the smell that is created when the first raindrops fall on the ceramic shingles of an Asian roof. Sakamoto makes paper for all of the senses, paper that makes a statement and is sufficient unto itself. He does all this with his characteristic nintai, his philosophical patience.

 

In addition Sakamoto-sensei designs his own artist’s papers, which put every connoisseur of Japanese washi culture into a state of rapture. The master blends natural growth with hand-scooping. He is always searching for special leaves in the expansive Japanese forests and for fragrant algae on the beaches, which he then combines with the centimetre-thick pulp. The dried works face us like reliefs; the relics of nature can be vaguely discerned rather than seen, in fact it is easier to smell them.

 

However, Sakamoto also incorporates manmade artefacts into his papers. He regularly travels to Nepal and scrapes the surfaces off the typical, colourful clay houses in order to mix the scrapings into his paper slurry. This produces lively colour structures with their own unique smell: it is exactly the smell that is created when the first raindrops fall on the ceramic shingles of an Asian roof. Sakamoto makes paper for all of the senses, paper that makes a statement and is sufficient unto itself. He does all this with his characteristic nintai, his philosophical patience.


Nr. 18 Kubisuji

Kubisuji

Japan

Naoki Sakamoto’s washi art and Frauke Eigen’s photography are two of a kind. With nintai, philosophical patience, Frauke Eigen searches Japan’s natural environment for flowers, leaves and trees, for textiles and for skin, but also for artefacts and façades, which she adds to her carrier medium, her Baryte paper, where she makes them disappear. Special objects are tracked down on long excursions, whereupon they are examined for their aesthetic appeal and then incorporated into the paper by using the manufacturing methods of analogue photography.

 

Recently a new series of leaf pictures was created in Japan, in which Frauke Eigen has chosen to praise the shade. More important than the plants’ texture is the sunlight they keep out. The almost abstract vegetal elements suddenly become watermarks in the seemingly transparent “print”.

 

In her studies of Japan’s textile art Frauke Eigen is less interested in the picturesque beauty of the traditional kimono than in the sculptural quality of its interior structure. Here the light-sculptress manages to produce a mood on the Baryte paper that immediately encourages beholders to touch it, i.e. it challenges the haptic senses just as Sakamoto’s papers do.

 

Finally the two antipodes in Frauke Eigen’s photography: details of façades and of nudes. Here the artist achieves the highest degree of abstraction though the detailing. By playing with light and shadow she manages to lend the rough walls sensuality and the beautiful bodies coolness. Nevertheless, in light of the large-scale dimension of the prints in both of these categories, beholders believe themselves able to capture the fine scent that sometimes emanates from houses and bodies.

 

Frauke Eigen has instinctively captured the appeal of Japanese aesthetics and adopted it as her own in her art. However, she has not done this in the way in which many Western guests seek to subdue the arts of archery, ikebana, the tea ceremony or of calligraphy. Frauke Eigen has noticed that in patience, that is, in nintai, there can lie a key to a very different culture.

 

 

 

 


Katalog Langen Foundation

Catalogue: Photographien, Frauke Eigen

Publisher: Mönchehaus Museum Goslar, Langen Foundation Neuss

Text: Prof. Dr. Ulrich Schneider

48 Pages, 2009