Tokyo, 4 November, /AJMEDIA/
Artist Yukimasa Ida’s first major museum exhibition, “Panta Rhei: For as long as the world turns,” at Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art (on view through Dec. 3), presents the 33-year-old painter taking another big step in his wildly successful career.
The Tottori-born artist, a graduate of Tokyo University of the Arts and son of sculptor and Yonagi Sculpture Symposium founder, Katsumasa Ida, first gained major recognition in 2016, winning the Contemporary Art Foundation Award’s special jury prize. Ida followed up that accolade by becoming the youngest artist to take part in the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation’s charity auction in 2017 and being included in Forbes’ 30 under 30 selection in 2018 — more early success than most young artists could reasonably expect.
In an art world increasingly dominated by wealth, “nepo babies” and artists who are as famous for their proximity to fame (Ida is known for his friendship with kabuki actor Ukon Onoe) as their artistic output, some might question such a quick rise as a result of being well-connected. What isn’t under question, however, is Ida’s talent and ability to paint.
“Panta Rhei” curator Jerome Sans, co-founder of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and director of the Uelens International Art Center in Beijing, makes this clear by choosing to lead off the Kyoto exhibition with Ida’s dynamic abstract portraits. Room One is lined with the artist’s emblematic portraits on each side. Flourishes of thick, masterful paint strokes on canvas boldly announce Ida’s kinetic technique and spectacular command of color and texture. Ida’s portraits are dynamic, full of movement and energy.
Unfortunately, we’ve seen this before in the distorted portraiture of artists like Francis Bacon (whom Ida cites as a major influence), Adrian Ghenie, Dimitri Pavlotsky and others who deftly use color and movement to abstract their subjects.
Ida writes in the exhibition description that portraits are a way of “knowing yourself through other people,” meaning “everything is a sort of self-portrait.”
Numerous pieces in the exhibition are labeled self-portraits, but nothing in their style or substance separates them from other works or gives us a hint of how Ida might see or feel about himself as an artist or as a human being.
There are also hints of commercialism and superficiality that diminish the beauty of the works themselves. Ida’s portrait of Christian Dior is presented with the fashion brand founder’s quote: “Zest is the secret of all beauty.” The line does little more than signal the commercial success Ida has enjoyed and reinforce the melding of fashion and fine art. (Ida collaborated with the brand for its Dior Lady Art handbags in 2022.)
Much of the language Ida uses to explain his work implies ephemerality, but it sometimes sounds more like clever branding for the art market than honest personal expressions that help inform the viewer.
One of Ida’s ongoing themes is “ichigo ichi e” (once in a lifetime), a term Ida says he decided to explore when he returned to Japan after a trip to India. This theme feels ready-made as a catchy Japanese phrase to attract Westerners, in the vein of exoticized words like ikigai (life purpose) or wabi-sabi (beauty in imperfection).
Meanwhile, the title of the current exhibition, “Panta Rhei,” meaning “everything flows,” references Greek philosopher Heraclitus, and there is a thread of impermanence running throughout the show, but perhaps not the sort Ida intends.
His abstract portraits, the strongest work of the exhibition, are followed by 12 bronze sculptures of well-known historical figures such as Donald Trump, the Pope (an homage to Bacon’s “Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X”), Queen Elizabeth II, and other busts labeled as self-portraits.
In light of Ida’s sculptural pedigree, viewers may get the impression that he created these objects simply to show that he can. The sculptures are shaped in the same swirling textures and sharp edges of his pictorial work, but after the vibrancy of those initial portraits and given the rather obvious choices of sculpture subjects, their impact is muted.
Both Room Three, which features Ida’s “figurative paintings” on a bright yellow wall, and Room Four, which presents abstract paintings over a backdrop covered by a busy fragment of another abstract painting, reveal how dependent Ida is on referencing great art of the past.
Ida claims “innovation takes over tradition and updates it” and that he “acts as a bridge” between the two, but the derivative pieces feel a bit like a bridge to nowhere, conceptually incohesive and weaker in command than his abstract works.
In these two rooms, the impressively cultivated style of Ida’s portraiture slips, replaced by the referential pop-culture vernacular of street artists and revealing some of his limitations in skill and imagination.
References to other works of art in titles such as “The Starry Night,” “Monet’s Garden” and “King of Limbs” (a possible Radiohead album reference), begin to collapse on themselves without the “avant-garde innovation” Ida says he is striving for in these series.
Ida has said he thinks of his art more as manufacturing, and Room Five, titled “End of today,” is an exercise in that concept of iterative automation, featuring over 300 smaller paintings that resemble the daily posts that populate our social media feeds.
This steady display of skill acts as an unpretentious constraint in which Ida seems fully at ease, using his gift for rhythm, movement and color to freely capture each day in oil and canvas — the way the rest of us might use our smartphone cameras to record our daily lives.
Ten large wooden totem-like sculptures fill Room Six, offering another example of Ida’s desire to challenge the work of those he admires (this time it’s painter and sculptor, Georg Baselitz) by giving us updated versions of their creations. The attempts would have more impact if Ida’s work aimed to provoke with the kind of artistic iconoclasm of Baselitz’ sculptures, which were labeled indecent and shocked the authorities and the art world.
These reworkings elicit no such reaction, as Ida’s giants stand mainly as a display of his style and ability.
The final, dimly lit Room Seven gives us Ida’s take on Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” Once again Ida’s style becomes street-art adjacent, while the choice of subject feels exhausted of any potential to say something new.
It’s a confusing choice for a finale: Why create yet another version of one of the most replicated, interpreted and satirized masterpieces?
Ida’s statement gives us only a confused description involving women’s position in society (the table is populated by what appear to be women), artificial intelligence and robots replacing humans (the supposed women are in fact “objects,” he explains); it’s a muddle of contemporary issues combined in the name of satire. What Ida’s “Last Supper” is satirizing isn’t at all clear, and the rigid, collage-like treatment lacks the primal energy and ecstatic beauty of Ida’s other works.
Like a talented musician who can solo with the best of them but struggles to write a classic song of his own, Ida seems to have chosen to rely on sampling great artists of the past, which may actually suit the current times of cut-and-paste meme culture but also feels like artistic immaturity.
Ida is an exceptional painter. The next step would be deciding whether he has anything new to say or is satisfied to be a success by reinterpreting the legendary artists he so clearly admires.