SUIZU TATSUHIRO

Statement

During my childhood, my father, like many Japanese businessmen at the time, was always away, sometimes on long overseas business trips, and rarely spent time with me. It meant that there was no one beyond my mother's protective world to satisfy my keen interest in perceiving the wider world and how to live in it. This interest grew stronger, and to satisfy this craving, I ravenously studied the lives of historical figures – particularly artists' lives. I realized depicting the world I live in is my way of engaging with the wider world. 
Today, I live in harmony with the Japanese view of nature and aesthetics while enjoying the benefits of Western science and technology. This duality is apparent in the landscapes of Japan. Natural landscapes and places that were once recognizable by the makura sayings of old Japan are now crisscrossed with power lines, with tall buildings lined in straight rows. The juxtaposition of different phases of information, feelings evoked by poetic expressions, the issues related to the environment and caused by modern technology, and so on, is concealed there.
Landscape paintings reflect how people perceive and interact with nature in a given era and culture. For example, in the West, landscapes are drawn using a one-point perspective, and nature is observed as an object. On the other hand, in pre-modern China, they painted landscapes from the standpoint of moving freely between the images, the boundaries between subject and object were ambiguous, and nature was perceived as an aesthetic and religious, spiritual realm. While Japanese landscape paintings are based on Chinese landscape techniques, they emphasize an aesthetic of simplicity and the beauty of blank, negative spaces.
Since ancient times in Japan, the landscape has generated an aesthetic expression such as yugen, which evokes the infinity of the world behind nature, and wabi-sabi, which calls attention to the value of minimal elements as rich and beautiful. It shows the spiritual depth and transition to the value of incomplete or imperfect, which is applied to applaud the paintings and even the tea bowl's surface or the blur of sumi ink. I learn from nature and history following the traditional values of Japanese artists. My work is the intersection of action/spontaneity and thought/theory. “Action” implies the expression based on spontaneous sensation over theory experiencing the world. "Thought" is the assertion based on the theory recognizing the world. My works are divided into two groups depending on which of the two my focus is placed on.
I paint by referencing and examining various issues related to landscapes' history, regionality, and environment. I aim to discover the peculiarities of our time or the universality common to all human beings. I face the landscape to understand how people face the world.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　
SUIZU TATSUHIRO　Jan.2023