PROVENANCE:
Private collection, France
Private collection, Asia

Kumi Sugai was born in the Higashinada district of Kobe City, Japan in 1919. He enrolled in the Osaka School of Fine Arts, but had to withdraw due to illness. In 1937 he took up a position in commercial advertising design in the advertising department of the Hankyu Kyuko Railway Company. After traveling to France to study in 1952, Sugai integrated traditional Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock print forms and techniques with his own unique artistic vision; his exotic artistic style won him great renown within artistic circles in Paris. Initially, Sugai was heavily influenced by the Surrealist and Abstract Impressionist movements; most of his works during this early period involved pictograms. In 1962, Sugai began to gradually change his style, abandoning the original inherent meaning of the Chinese characters that he used in his paintings and instead giving them his own independently-derived significance. Sugai's later work tended to use clear, distinct colors and forms to express a modest, down-to-earth aesthetic stance.

This particular work by Kumi Sugai, entitled Quatre Pièces, was created during the period when he was working on a mural at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo after returning to Japan following a car accident in Paris. It represents a new stage in his artistic career, as Sugai once again began to emphasize the importance of form, adopting circles and lines within geometric shapes that reflected his advocacy of Art informel. Sugai's reconstructed Chinese characters have a kind of sublime purity that prevents them from being pigeonholed as either innovative or traditional. The combination of a quasimystical ancient Asian dialect with the mystery of Westernstyle totemic symbolism has a hypnotic power, and exerts a direct emotional impact on the viewer.

Quatre Pièces is painted using muted color tones, and yet it has a faint radiance, with the warmth and humanity of the colors being somehow fused into the abstract forms. In moving beyond the original structure of the Chinese characters, and in utilizing a reddish-brown color that is both warm and visually-striking, Sugai was able to achieve an effect similar to the light emanating from grains of sand in a deep valley. Kumi Sugai's later work was characterized by more pronounced outline and a strong sense of geometric form; this particular painting stands out because of its smooth, misty brushwork. Kumi Sugai succeeded in redefining the rough contour aesthetics of Art informel, in such a way that, as the viewer starts to examine the work more closely, it becomes clear that the artist has gone beyond the rigorous, systematic tradition of the Chinese character to create a surrealist vision. The viewer cannot help but feel astounded at the precision with which the work has been executed!