An Industrial-Strength Exhibit from Haraguchi

Upon birth, it seems, every Japanese is handed the lifelong challenge of reconciling in his own life the dueling forces that constitute his world: the native and the foreign, the traditional and the modern.

It is a dilemma that artist Noriyuki Haraguchi is still trying to resolve. Visitors to his exhibit “Present Moments” at the San Diego State University Art Gallery (through May 25), might conclude at first glance that Haraguchi’s only response to tradition has been to abandon it.

Upon entering the gallery, one is confronted immediately with an experience that sparks more than the usual tactile and visual senses. Haraguchi’s installation smells--and strongly. Most of the gallery’s floor space is taken up by a low iron-framed pool, filled to its edges with hundreds of gallons of reprocessed oil.

Raised a few inches off the floor, the pool seems to float, its dark, glassy surface offering at once the seductions of infinite depth and precise reflection. Haraguchi’s large black drawings on the surrounding walls repeat themselves on the surface of the pool, where the gallery’s arched entrance also joins with its double to form a complete circle.

Despite its industrial materials and potent odor, “Matter and Mind” invites the same sort of prolonged meditation and spiritual contemplation as a centuries-old Japanese rock garden. This is the type of continuity with tradition that Haraguchi seeks, he said through an interpreter during a recent visit to San Diego.

Insistent that his work remain open to interpretation, Haraguchi steered clear of actual explanations, but did account for several factors that influenced his choice of materials and processes.

Like his contemporaries in the Mono-ha (“things group”) who began making large-scale sculpture in the late 1960s, Haraguchi’s prime interest was in the pure physicality of objects. But Haraguchi, now in his early 40s, resisted a close alignment with the group, citing what he called “a danger” in their use of materials such as rocks and wood that have a superficial similarity to traditional Japanese architecture and garden design.

Besides, he added, his own environment bore no relation to a Japanese garden. Rusted warehouses, military trucks and oil barrels were more common sights in his hometown of Yokosuka, a port city on the Tokyo bay. Today, Haraguchi’s studio is housed in one of these warehouses, in the industrial section of Taura.

“His use of industrial materials relates to how strong an industrial power Japan has become,” says Stuart Regen, director of the Hoffman Borman Gallery in Santa Monica, which exhibited Haraguchi’s work last year. “In general, Japanese art has always been so precious and delicate. He uses tough, industrial materials but in a very graceful and delicate way.”

Haraguchi’s studies at Nihon University in Tokyo bypassed traditional Japanese art to focus on oil painting in the Western style. During those years, he recalled, artists in Japan reacted to the country’s tremendous economic growth and influx of foreign influences in much the same way as the rest of the population--by swallowing the imported ideas whole. Abstract Expressionist painting found a strong following there, as did pop art and minimalism.

By the early ‘70s, however, Haraguchi felt a need to keep his distance from these trends and to re-evaluate his own position. His search for an art of universal meaning led him to use spare, geometric forms and to explore the essences of his materials. This, he laughed, is when he switched from oil paint to pure oil. Wanting a closer relationship with his medium, he began using oil directly, as a medium and a subject in itself, rather than simply as a tool for depicting something else.

Haraguchi admitted that the notion of “letting the materials speak” stems from the heart of Japanese tradition, though the materials he chooses--silicon rubber, polyurethane and steel--do not. Surface similarities to traditional Japanese art are, as ever, avoided by Haraguchi, but not at the expense of more subtle, underlying affinities. Though Haraguchi never works in the traditional manner of ink painting known as sumi, his entirely black drawings bear their influence. From sumi, Haraguchi learned that black alone can convey limitless nuance and texture.

For his large drawings on used truck tarpaulins, Haraguchi said he relies only on his own intuitive response to the canvas’ woven surface, seams, patches and flaps in relation to the given time and his own body. He makes no sketches or preparatory plans. Facing these surfaces, he said, he faces himself. Both are equally open to possibility and interpretation, and both court ambiguity.

“Even though my work is perceived as unequivocal structure, and as such is placed in the prevailing flow of art,” he writes in his statement for the show, “it is undesirable to specify a theme, a central focus, because justification in art is deceptive, and therefore to be nullified.