Brussels, 31 July 2010
Dear Deborah,
Thank you for mailing me your MUBE NARU KANA postcard art. I've put the image on Facebook, IUOMA and the Friour Multiply Network site, so maximum exposure so to speak!
I don't know if you know the art of MASAMI TERAOKA? He continues in the tradition of the Japanese print makers but with contemporary themes and techniques. He made a serial of prints against the invasion of Mc Donalds in Japan. His works and creations are published in the book "Waves and Plagues, the art of Masami Teraoka" (Chronicle Books ISBN 0-87701-590-2)
The first art I bought decades ago were some Japanese prints. I became attracted to that culture based on reading books, so literature (Mishima, Oë; Fukazawa, Murakami, Yoshimoto, Tanazaki, Kawabata, Ozeki, Kagawa, Dazai, Niwa, Ishizaka, Akutagawa, Nagai and some others) and movies of course (Kurosawa, Imamura, Ishii, Kobayoshi, Oshima, Kawase, Kitano and others).
My love for poetry made me discover HAIKU at a very early age (as a teen in fact). I befriended a priest teacher who published his own Haiku zine called "WATER EN WOLKEN" (Water and clouds, in Dutch). That priest renounced the catholic church because he fell in love with a nurse, married her and lost in consequence his teaching job in the catholic school I was attending …
Discovering a culture is an eye opener always but you have to keep an open eye also on the blind spots of that culture.
I find Japanese culture (which I love!) also extremely sadistic and perverse at some times.
I understand and approve the criticism of Teraoka on the evolution of food culture (this criticism is not weird by the way) but today you also see the introduction of a Japanese fast food culture in the world (a kind of Sushi fast food restaurants similar to the Mc Donald one).
From the gallery owner in Brussels where I bought my first Japanese prints I learned about the taboo on butchers in Japan. They are outcasts and paria's because they work with meat!
Is there no end to exclusion of groups considered as unclean because they do a particular kind of job? All cultures "seem to be sick in the same bed" (Flemish expression).
Japan is keen of fish, well on eating fish anyway, they are more and more labeled as organizing a world wide slaughterhouse of the ocean, just for expanding their own food purposes.
Are they any Haiku on fish? Sympathizing with fish I mean?
Maybe your knowledge is better or bigger than mine?
I did not find any which is peculiar or understandable in the sense fish is seen as mainly a food source without a soul. Strange if you compare this with the haikus on birds, snails, frogs, insects, cats and dogs and so on.
I only know a rather famous fishing Haiku by Basho, open of course to interpretation and I know it only by English translations:
"Watching the cormorant fishing boats
in time
I was full of sorrow"
(in the translation of Jonathan Clements, book "the moon in the pines")
"Delight, then sorrow
aboard the cormorant
fishing boat"
(in the translation of Sam Hamill, book "the sound of water")
Translation one reads as a kind of compassion for the fish?
Translation two reads as a compassion for fish and fishermen??
Maybe you can enlighten me?
That fish angle made me do the works I've included. The image in b/w is a mirror of the one in color. I like to play with mirror images and how things change or alter or transform once you make the voyage through the looking glass.
By the way Antic-Ham of South Korea has a similar food call to yours. I've included her flyer and my postcard contribution to the project. In fact she mails a postcard with stamp art and asks that you add & return. So ask her for a post card if you are interested in participating.
Postal greetings from http://guidovermeulen.blogspot.com
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