Asia

Gozo Yoshimasu

Dear Monster

2014

Dear Monster, 2014

Gozo Yoshimasu’s visual-poetry series Dear Monster (Kaibutsu-kun) explores his response to the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. He embarked on the project out of a deep sense of sympathy and commitment, in pursuit of “poetry possible after March 2011”, without exactly knowing where he was heading. He started scribing lines and letters on exceptionally large manuscript paper that he handcrafted every day. The new routine resembled the way that Buddhist monks copy sutras; Yoshimasu prepared the materials, his groundwork, and ran a pen across them day after day, “as though tattooing” on his mind.

The series as a whole includes manuscripts on which are extensive enumerations of letters and words repeatedly dismantled and rearranged in response to the voices and shadows of the deceased, recovered by painted color layers. This series appropriates tragedy through the act of interfering with and destroying the process of language production, while creating existential dreamscapes offering new flux or a peculiar prayer.

Gozo Yoshimasu is a prolific Japanese poet, photographer, artist and filmmaker active since the 1960s. Yoshimasu seeks to recover and reinvent the shared roots between poetry and performance. His poems turn the Japanese language into a machine for generating new meaning, as reflected in the collage-like appearance of his manuscripts. Yoshimasu has also developed his poetry into other forms of artistic expression—photography, engraving, calligraphy and films—to connect real landscapes to create a visionary world of his own that captures a delicate, almost invisible texture that exists in all things. His art draws on the ancient tradition of Japanese calligraphy, which appears across the works.

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Gozo Yoshimasu Dear Monster

Gozo Yoshimasu

Dear Monster