展覧会を担当した籾山昌夫・主任学芸員によると、当時宮崎進が一番苦しかったのはソ満国境地帯にひろがる最前線の泥土を這いまわっていたときだという。「黒い風景」(1993年)が示す果てしない泥また泥。ゴーリンへ送られたときは、かえってホッとしたという。これでひとまずは生きられると。五味川純平の「人間の条件」の、さらにはるか上をいく体験だ。
画面にしばしば登場してくる縦横の直線は、ラーゲリの鉄格子を表しているという。そして空を飛ぶ鳥の自由、シベリアの大地を突然のように埋めつくす血のごとき赤い花。死んでいった戦友たちの顔。シベリアから命からがら帰ってきたら、懐かしい思い出の地広島は原爆で、それこそ何から何まで焼き尽くされていた。虐殺と戦慄のドンデン返し。
どれもがリアルであるが故に、救いようもなく分断されている。そしてそのすべての裂け目から、死と生が噴き出してくる。藤田嗣治の兵士の山とはまた異なった、美術ばかりか人間さえも立ち入ることのできないこうした営みを、一体われわれはどうすればいいのだろう。(『立ちのぼる生命 宮崎進展』神奈川県立近代美術館 葉山、〜2014年6月29日)
★★★★★
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[Exhibition Essay]
I Saw the Unspeakable
Jun Teshigawara (art critic)
December 1945 to December 1949. Shin Miyazaki was taken prisoner by the Soviet army at Mudanjiang in northeastern Manchuria and interned at Golin 205, a gulag near Komsomolsk-on-Amur.
Such is ordinarily spoken of as a historical fact, an incident in a war occurring 69-65 years ago. What we see in this exhibition, however, is clearly not history. Whether a panel layered with jute cloth or an assembly of wood, what is presented is not history or requiem but a “view” of a reality that is continually being replayed, even now. Because it was the artist himself who witnessed that reality, his resulting crystallization of that experience is unfading. The artist has shunned art and cast it out. As a result, when standing before his works, we have a real experience not a vicarious one. According to Prof. Masao Momiyama, who curated the exhibition, what Miyazaki found the hardest among his experiences of those years was fleeing through fields of mud at the front line of battle, along the Soviet border. The endless mud, mud, and more mud we encounter in Black Landscape (1993). When sent to the gulag, he actually felt relieved, he has said. There, he could manage to stay alive for the time being. An experience one rank more cruel than that described by Junpei Gomikawa in The Human Condition. The lines lengthwise and crosswise often appearing in his canvases express the bars at the gulag, Miyazaki says. Other motifs include birds enjoying the freedom of the sky, bright blood-red flowers blooming en mass on the Siberian land, and the faces of war companions who perished. Also, the unexpected twist of shock and slaughter on returning, miraculously alive, to Japan?Hiroshima, a city of nostalgic memories for Miyazaki, utterly destroyed by an atomic blast. Because each is so real, it stands irreparably alone, divided from the others. And from all the cracks among them rage death and life. How on earth are we to respond to this artist’s realm of endeavor, which is so unlike Leonard Foujita’s mountain of soldiers or anything else? A realm forbidding entry to art and even to human beings. (“Breath of Life: Shin Miyazaki,” The Museum of Modern Art, Hayama, April 5 to June 29, 2014.)
Translated by Brian Amstutz |