In April 2018 Masuda Yoriyasu,¹ director of Imadate Art Field, walked the corridors of Imadate Art Hall in Echizen, Japan, surveying the myriad installations that artists had assembled over the course of two weeks. The 2018 iteration of the “Imadate Exhibition of Contemporary Paper Art” was a special one, coinciding with the one-thousand-three-hundredth anniversary of the annual festival to the papermaking goddess. Throughout the papermaking village, papermakers were setting up their wares in the town square, homes were prepping rice balls and tea for soon-to-be-weary mikoshi carriers,² and the shrine was bustling with community volunteers and media.

The “Imadate Exhibition of Contemporary Paper Art” often overlaps with the papermaking goddess festival as a way to facilitate a discussion between the old and the new. To commemorate the momentous anniversary in 2018, Masuda took great care to do something he had never done before. In the north gallery of Imadate Art Hall, he assembled a historical timeline of all contemporary paper-art exhibitions that had taken place in Echizen, from 1979 to 2018.³ As a visitor, I was impressed with the archive presented on a long stretch of panels laden with fliers and newspaper articles published over the decades. Masuda converted the foyer of Imadate Art Hall into a makeshift reading room where visitors could browse previous catalogues. I thumbed through dusty, yellowed pamphlets and glossy pages. Year after year, a powerhouse of paper art had been produced in Echizen.

The first exhibition in 1979 was titled “Experimental Exhibition of Paper Art,” and was the brainchild of an artist named Kawai Isamu. Kawai worked deftly between disciplines, and his vast body of work incorporates painting, ceramics, and photography among others. He was a world traveler, born in Peru before his family returned to Fukui prefecture when he was ten years old. In 1960, he relocated to New York, at the age of 29, and was introduced to artists such as Kusama Yayoi and Kawabata Minoru. His photographs from this era reveal participation in counter-culture protests and opposition to the Vietnam War.⁴ In 1968, he returned to Japan and became involved with the Hokubi artist movement, a group based in the Hokuriku region of Japan.⁵ Hokubi artists wanted to bring contemporary art to the community—to provide venues for artists in local areas and advance art in Fukui and the Hokuriku region. Kawai thrived within this model. In a Hokubi Bunka [Culture] Chronicle pamphlet from 1977, the group contended that galleries in major cities charged oppressive fees, and while critics and a large audience might view an artist’s work in such spaces, they believed that critical evaluation was far less important than art’s potential impact on local communities.⁶ The Hokubi group was more focused on sharing art with neighbors and people they ran into at the market, not gallery bigwigs and tourists.

In 1979 Kawai Isamu noticed hefty stacks of paper in a dumpster destined for the local garbage incinerator in Echizen. There was a range of papers there: machine-made rolls, handmade sheets with blemishes, and discolored, torn sheets from sliding doors. Kawai and his artist friends, including Masuda Yoriyasu, gathered and removed the paper from the dumpster, committing themselves to making works of art with the material. Thus, the first “Experimental Exhibition of Paper Art” was born, perhaps a world’s first.

In October 1979, a month before the opening of the exhibition, Kawai was admitted to Fukui Prefectural Hospital with malignant lymphoma. To cheer him up in the hospital, the fledgling group of artists lifted his truck with a rope made entirely of washi, suspending it in the exhibition hall. On January 27, 1980, two months after the first “Experimental Exhibition of Paper Art,” Kawai Isamu passed away in the hospital. He was 48 years old.

On display in the 2018 exhibition, Masuda’s meticulous archiving laid bare Kawai Isamu’s influence on the event over the decades; for Masuda, assembling the archive was as much an effort to preserve the philosophy of the organization as it was a tribute to a kindred spirit. “It has always been about bringing art to local people,” Masuda told me.⁷ The exhibition of contemporary paper art eventually morphed into a non-profit organization called Imadate Art Field (IAF). Like Hokubi, IAF has never sought to display work in the museums of Tokyo or other metropolitan art galleries. IAF uses community centers, local art halls, or houses and other repurposed structures within the village itself. Years of catalogues reveal disparate themes, artists who come and go, and constantly changing spaces. Yet there is a remarkable consistency in execution, and an unyielding devotion to presenting novel uses of paper in a village with centuries of papermaking history.

“Echizen is filled with handmade paper,” explained Masuda. “Naturally we facilitated making art there. Artists and craftspeople could see and meet each other.”⁸ Some artists come to the village and make site-specific work within the same structure they will show it in. Others are local artists who are showing work in places they have known since childhood. The artists, regardless of where they come from, paper from craftspeople in the village, papermakers who live and work a stone’s throw from where the artist is creating and displaying the work. The papermaker gets to see the production and the final artwork made from their product. The archives are overflowing with documentation of energetic smiles and camaraderie amidst the bustle of an “Art Camp,” as it came to be known.

Imadate Art Field organizes educational programs within the very community it serves. The Art Camp residency, started in 1996, is featured prominently in their catalogues, along with a detailed record of public artist talks, workshops, and performances. This programming is designed to function as an open platform for the community to interface with creators. As one of dozens of examples, in 2018, sculptor Takada Yoichi taught a workshop on the aerodynamism of handmade paper objects. Largely attended by craftspeople and their children, participants made paper whirligigs and tiny helicopters out of Echizen washi.

In Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, author Eilean Hooper-Greenhill argues, “The Medici Palace could not have functioned without spectators.”⁹ The Eurocentric idea of museums evolved from private collections designed to inspire awe through distance. Objects in these collections were meant to be marveled at because they were far removed from the viewer’s means; the foreign and exotic displayed before them presented a world of mystic purpose. It is my belief that we must examine these classist roots of our museum system, and reconsider how museums could best serve their communities. Today, as evidenced by symposiums and seminars throughout the curatorial community, there is a great push to redefine the outdated museum model.

When I asked Masuda why handmade paper art is not considered “mainstream” in blue-chip art galleries and major museums in Japan, he responded, “There is little education, and little interest.”¹⁰ I would agree. In a country where handmade paper has played such an integral role in art and culture over centuries, you can count on one hand the number of universities or art colleges that teach papermaking, and you can be sure that “paper art” rarely shows up in the high-brow galleries of Ginza, Tokyo. Showing in such spaces would never matter to Masuda, nor would it to any of the other movers and shakers involved in Imadate Art Field. For them, Echizen is a character in the artwork. Without the village, there is no “Experimental Exhibition of Paper Art.”

This is not to say that artists and craftspeople have always coexisted in perfect harmony in Echizen. While there has never been overt conflict, the first “Experimental Exhibition of Paper Art” was met with bewilderment by most of the local craftspeople. Yet to the organizers, this was their home, too, and contemporary art had just as much a place in Echizen as the sugeta and nagashizuki.¹¹ In the 1999 catalogue of works, the then-mayor of Imadate, Tsujioka Shunzo, wrote, “At first, local people couldn’t understand these exhibitions deeply.”¹² However, fast forward to the 2000s, the archives demonstrate that even local washi craftspeople began to actively take part in the exhibition.

In the 2020 exhibition, Iwano Ichibei, ninth-generation papermaker and designated living national treasure, inserted geometric shapes into his renowned hosho paper, and displayed them backlit by natural light coming through a storehouse’s window. In the same year, as he had for several years beforehand, craftsman Osada Kazuya of the Osada Paper Mill presented elaborate pulp-painted tapestries. His mother Eiko, well known for her paper that evokes stained glass, has also contributed to the exhibition over the years. The Osadas are a family that straddles the realms of art and craft, an outdated, and ultimately false, dichotomy that Imadate Art Field strives to lay to rest.

Truly, the vast archive of Imadate Art Field reveals a story of intersection. Papermakers make art, and artists make paper, or at the very least, each group spends their time admiring the other. Beyond these groups, there are the townspeople who are eager to try new workshops and see fresh perspectives.

More and more, houses are being donated to Imadate Art Field. They get tidied up and repurposed into exhibition spaces. A notable recent addition is the Nishino House, a registered historical storehouse. However, while organizers will declutter spaces, they will never remove ephemera from the houses. One exhibition space has walls lined with miso jugs; in another, a bundle of zori (thong sandals) hangs from the ceiling. To Imadate Art Field, retaining these objects are part of the mission—to never wash a space of its former life, but to embrace it, and breed new ideas within it. The archive reflects the transformation from art hall to art village. Catalogues contain maps and artist portraits, enabling visitors to embark on a walking tour of Echizen while seeing the various works within the alleys and storied walls during, and for some works after, the run of the exhibition.

The nearly forty-year-long archive put on display in 2018 summarized an event that for years has been a celebration, rather than a straightforward transaction between artist and viewer, or artist and papermaker. Imadate Art Field has moved through the years with this adaptive mentality. From the archive, we can learn new strategies in how to display art made with or featuring handmade paper, and how to create the conditions for different types of makers to interact with one another. An entire village of papermakers is not something every artist has access to. However, why limit our practice and display strategies to the confines of establishments that seek to recreate the distance of the Medici Palace?

Community has been the locus of inspiration in hand papermaking’s more than two thousand years of history. Perhaps contemporary papermaking will forever hover at a crossroads: does it blend into all other media and techniques, thereby fitting neatly onto white walls? Or does it utilize its ability to be simultaneously ubiquitous and transient, and ever-reactive to time, just as pulp itself? I do not know the answer to this question. But as Masuda is fond of saying: Maybe permanence is not needed.

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NOTES

1.
Editor’s Note: In this article, Japanese names are given in Japanese name order (family name preceding given names).

2.
Mikoshi are portable shrines carried by villagers during festivals.

3.
For context, IAPMA (the International Association of Papermaking Artists) was established in 1986, while North American Hand Papermakers (formerly Friends of Dard Hunter) was established in 1981.

4.
“The Trajectory of the Painter Kawai Isamu” from the series “Living: That’s Art,” film on Fukui Television, 1996. 「生きること、それがアートだ」〜画家河合勇の軌跡〜

5.
This region is comprised of Ishikawa, Fukui, Niigata, and Toyama prefectures.

6.
“Hokubi Experience,” Hokubi Bunka Chronicle No. 16 ’77 (Hokubi Group, 1977): 2. Translated by the author.

7.
Masuda Yoriyasu, interview with the author, July 25, 2021.

8.
Ibid.

9.
Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1992), 69.

10.

Masuda Yoriyasu, interview with the author, July 25, 2021.

11.
Sugeta: the wooden frame and bamboo lattice screen used in traditional Japanese papermaking. Nagashizuki: traditional Japanese sheet-forming in which multiple dips create a single sheet of paper.

12.
On the Occasion of the Publication of the Catalogue “18th Imadate Exhibition of Contemporary Art Works,” in Imadate Exhibition of Contemporary Art Works vol. 18 (Echizen: Imadate Art Field, 1999): 3. Publication is bilingual, English and Japanese.

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