Kiyomitsu Yoshimura
Maurizio Pellegrin:The Structure of Iki
 
Bologna, 1998
catalogue of the exhibition (Galleria Marabini)
 

Everything moves back to its origins.
To move backwards to one’s origins signifies tranquillity.
To be in tranquillity means to sea one’s “being in itself”.
The being in itself is the unchangeable law of change.
To understand this unchangeable change signifies the achievement of illumination. (1)
 

The Structure of Iki
Kiyomitsu Yoshimura

In Japanese culture Iki corresponds to a phenomenon of awareness revealing itself from between formal causes made up of an ideal tension.
“One can say the Iki is a material cause which has fully realized its own being thanks to the formal causes constituted by ideal tension and by Buddhist unreality”. (2)
The first of Iki’s attributes is Seduction. By seduction is meant the means whereby the possibility of the creation of the relationship is anticipated and made easier.
The form and attitude of such relationship must be based on duality and dynamism.
In Iki the possibility is rendered absolute and its seduction renews itself in a movement in upon itself which is never completed, and then unexpectedly,
it reopens.
Possibility is openness towards the other. The force responsible for the duration and tension of this possibility is energy. Iki’s second attribute is thus Spiritual energy which strengthens and moves Seduction in its essence.
The third attribute is Renunciation. Renunciation becomes the ability to free one’s self from attachment, and this movement is gained through the use of knowledge of destiny. The position of Seduction seems almost paradoxical – to continue to exist, it is forced to renounce the achievement of its own end. In this tension though it finds its own raison d’être and renewal.

Seduction
In The Red Wall the surface of the cloth acts both as an obstacle and, at the same time, as an attracting screen that does not allow a final conquest, but which bears witness to the impossibility of going beyond it. It is the unsustainable desire to come together, perpetrating the deception of distance – a silence of waters that are imagined, perceived, perhaps seen in time in memory or desire. It is also becomes the inability to overcome the event whose process develops over the years through the continuous act of demonstrating its indivisible and non-transferable existence.
It is an aristocracy of work which, in the negation of its own social nature becomes an act of modest display, a tiny model, a fragment of the universe.

Spiritual Energy
The Hands stretch out in the completeness of the circular form, ever immobile, ever moving. They provide a structure which enhances the convergence and flow of forces along the line of the circle.
Spiritual Energy is the creator of this line, and further, it is that which is beyond,
in the interior of this field. The hands depicted in this work are the repository of,
and are responsible for part of these energies. This work includes objects produced by industry for other industries. They are things created to give form to other things, and then to others again. A tension emerges from the hands where their static nature betrays the objects in movement. It also gives rise to movement which, having generated expansion, returns to its centre, its interior. It is Spiritual Energy which is to be symbolised – it is that critical point of tension which produces the force for Seduction, all effected in a vital movement. This work has no separation between masculine and feminine in its circular design. They are fused, Ying has joined with Yang.

Renunciation
Hours of Africa is the moment forever still, as if rendered absolute.
The photographic images of the small African Aklama sculptures of the Ewe tribe from Togo bear witness to the presence or absence of this suspended moment.
Everywhere is confirmed in the pre-selected place, individuality becomes multiple and symbolic. In the stilled moment, continuity seeps between the weight and dimensions of the objects and the symbolism of time embodied in the hours marked on the great dial. Continuity, requiring courage and love, is wedded to the renunciation of an end and its attachment precisely in that moment. Life foretells death, which justifies life itself.
The Renunciation which is affirmed to enhance that yearning and that desire to exist. Passing and immobility do not subvert temporal plans so far as they are foreseen, unavoidable, and not identifiable in this work.

Considerations
The works forming this exhibition have a common element: the thread.
This common element is not put forward solely as the choice of a material element,
of an object relating to another, but as the philosophical vehicle for this path.
The thread exploits its own movement for its own production and adapts itself and positions itself so as to define a formal and structural act (weaving, for instance). Symbolically the thread has precedents in history and literature. It is also able to maintain a physiognomy of work in the process of becoming, in a continual opening and closing. The works of this exhibition are open and closed. They other halt the thread together with their external and internal time by use, or they induce it to perpetuate itself in accordance with an wholly private mechanism.
The thread constrains them and brings them together in fragility. The sum of these inherent fragilities though, builds a profound internal force and pushes the work to the inevitable event of taking part in the life of the world, whether this be in the form of participation, rejection or solely an outline. This thread has a beginning and an end that cannot be perceived – and from this impossibility a sense of permanence and intangibility emanates.
A central concept of Eastern philosophy is that man’s natural state is that of enlightenment. (3) The thread can represent a symbolic means to follow the path across the superfluous dividing us from enlightenment.
The Small Bookshelves, as the setting for this action and setting for memory of the action, is the meditative part of this exhibition. The meditative approach invites us to go beyond our innermost perceptions, to the extent that our idea of the world is determined by our senses and is thus subjective. Truth becomes an arbitrary reflection of a limited perception. (4)
The Small Bookshelves, is that area of serenity which accepts our efforts, our attention and our reaching out towards the structure provided by Iki which becomes a means of obtaining verification and help in the process of coming closer to Knowledge.

Notes

(1) Lao-Tzu, Tao-teh-ching, il libro del Tao, Newton Compton, Roma, 1995.
(2) Kuki Shuzo, La struttura dell’Iki, Adelphi, Milano, 1992, p.63. (Iki no kozo) .
(3) Jou Tsung Hwa, Il Tao della Meditazione, la via dell’illuminazione, Ubaldini, Roma,1990, (The Tao of Meditation, way to enlightenment, Tai-Chi Foundation, Warwick, New York)p.15.
(4) Op. Cit., p.31.