Azimoto Nikkai is the young hope of calligraphers.
What kind of person does one imagine a calligrapher to be?
Someone who dresses in a kimono? Someone who doesn't speak much?
If these are the traditional style of calligraphers, we would see
he is a little different. He appears with a simple T-shirt and
jogging pants in front of visitors, and talks a lot.
He looks like a sports player rather than an artist. This may
be because he is young--he is thirty-four years old--but his
footstep is as light as a sports player s. His looks are
featureless. He has a simple syouyu-face. (Syouyu means
soy-sauce, and a syouyu-face means simple looks, not showy or
sober.) He seems to smile all the time. He lives with his wife
who is a designer in a small house in Tottori, and sometimes
holds exhibitions in big cities. His studio for calligraphy is a
small tatami-room, where there are many books on the shelf and
various kinds of writing brushes hanging down from the ceiling.
He is also a teacher of calligraphy in Tottori Higashi High
School.
"I was outgoing, and loved making people laugh with my jokes,"
he says, describing himself when he was a young boy. He spent his
childhood in Tokyo. He liked playing in a sandbox, building a
base, and roller-skating. He liked to be conspicuous and became a
class leader at elementary school and the president of student
representatives at junior high school.
It was by accident that he began learning calligraphy. Just
like the mothers of many other Japanese kids, his mother sent him
to calligraphy lessons because his writing was poor. This was
when he was seven years old.
When he moved to Tottori, where he was born, he quit the
lessons at the age of ten. In junior high school he was active
and joined a ping-pong club. It was when he entered high school
that his next meeting with calligraphy came. At an entrance
ceremony in the school he met a peculiar writing. It was just
information for new people, but he was attracted by the way it
was written.
This encounter had a crucial meaning in his life. After he
entered the school, he knew that it had been written by Shibayama
Houkai, who was a famous calligrapher and a teacher at his
school. He decided to join a calligraphy club and was led to the
world of calligraphy by this teacher.
Originally calligraphy, which has a history of 3,000 years,
was not included in "fine art." In the Orient, calligraphy was
developed by workmen and literary men. After World War 11, as
oriental calligraphy was introduced to the West, it appealed to
the Western abstract artists. Influenced by the Western concept
of fine art, the new movement of calligraphy arose, in which we
look at calligraphy not as a traditional art, but as some
catalyst to pull out an individual inner world.
Four calligraphers were in the main stream of the movement.
One of them is Tesima Yukei. Shibayama Houkai, who is Nikkai's
teacher, was the pupil of Yukei. When he was a high school
student, he got the prime minister's prize among 40,000 people in
a calligraphy contest at Heizan. This gave him good confidence to
live on calligraphy.
He was recommended to enter Tsukuba University to study
calligraphy. However what was waiting for him were old ideas
about calligraphy. He was so proud of his skill and his teacher,
Houkai, that it was difficult for him to accept what was told in
University. He often quarreled about the way of writing with the
professors there. It was not only he who questioned the
professors about the style, and some of his friends left school.
He was also about to lose his confidence in continuing to study
and didn't go to school for a year.
"I met almost nobody at that time. It was not until then that
I realized that my way of writing was totally Mr. Shibayama's
imitation. I felt that I needed some style of my own."
Then he began groping for his own calligraphy by reading many
philosophy books. It was not easy to get rid of his teacher's
style, but he tried hard to build his way by enriching himself
and concentrating on what he wanted to express. He returned to
school and graduated from there. By that time he could talk with
professors, and they got to accept each other.
After graduation he came back to Tottori and began his work
both as a teacher and as a calligrapher just like his teacher. At
the age of thirty-two he married a designer. When you see his
calligraphy for the first time, you may doubt if there are any
letters. On a big canvas there are bold letter-like things.
Sometimes it is a river; sometimes it is a mountain. We can see
life taking shape winding on canvas.
He talks about the importance of breath. Whether the work is
alive or not depends on the artist's physical movement. Here it
makes sense that his footstep is as light as a sports
player's.
A calligrapher's work may be similar to that of fishermen. He
catches life which resides in nature and instantly freezes it
into letters. If the work was made too slowly or too quickly, the
letters would take up or lack ink and, as a result, they wouldn't
look beautiful. As fishermen grasp the right timing of catching
fresh fish, calligraphers know when to put or to loosen force
when writing in order for letters to look beautiful or
lively.
"Since Chinese characters are hieroglyphic characters, they
are interesting when they are written in art form." With his eyes
shining, Azimoto Nikkai explains the charm of calligraphy. When
he sits at a canvas, he returns to his childhood when he was
playing in the unity of nature.
He is now devoting himself to the next exhibition with French
and Chinese artists to be held in New York. This is going to be
his first exhibition abroad. By the way, his name, Azimoto,
represents a fishing net and Nikkai, the sea in Chinese
characters. He is the hopeful fisherman, no, calligrapher,
Azimoto Nikkai.
by Ayako Iwatani
