Review / Nanae Mitobe solo exhibition "Study of Dansaekhwa" and "Dansaekhwa"

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Tsutomu Mizusawa "Nanae Mitobe’s Phenomenality "

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“Nanae Mitobe spent last fall in South Korea, where she once again engaged in a remarkably intense period of production. The new work that emerged from that time was presented in Tokyo in a two-part exhibition that inevitably heightened the impression of ongoing progress.”
These words are from my text “The Phenomenology of Painting Coming into Being,” which I wrote immediately after viewing the aforementioned exhibition together with the artist.
Painting, by and large, is regarded as a medium that is fixed and static and best displayed in white cube spaces, and whose masterpieces – even those of, for example, Jackson Pollock – are fated to become museum pieces locked behind glass. However, the presentation in a museum or gallery adds a spatiotemporal dimension to the experience of an artwork that is comparable to the staging of a musical performance.
I continued my essay as following:
“Her work exudes the impression of something about to be born, some kind of raw, vital immediacy: the phenomenon of permanent unfixedness. As a result, it has the capacity to evoke a sense of the true state of the world, regardless of the scale of her individual pieces.”
I concluded with:
“There will be people who will call her work a miracle.”

《Study of Dansaekhwa》Installation view　Photo by Hayato Wakabayashi

The first part of the exhibition (March 5–16, 2025), titled “Study of Dansaekhwa,” presented works created during the artist’s stay in Gwangju in South Korea at the end of 2024, with motifs ranging from humans to furniture. The second part (March 21–April 20), titled “Dansaekhwa,” featured numerous new works, including large-scale pieces, created after her return to Japan. In South Korea, Mitobe encountered dansaekhwa (monochrome painting), a significant style of contemporary Korean art, and was drawn to its monochromacity and unique materiality. She reduced the unrestrained, almost excessive use of color of previous works, as if suspending her own assumptions towards her past mode of production. Of course, the thickness of the paint – which gave her works an almost relief-like, quasi-threedimensial character – remains mostly the same, and her paintings still resist categorization as the kind of art that would obediently decorate walls. In fact, she has even created a work (Kkachi 까치, meaning “Magpie” in English) that is completely three-dimensional, made by piling plaster and ink-colored paint onto a pedestaled wooden core. The work prototypes paint as mass-like material, and while it exudes an air of calmed relaxation that is characteristic of animal depictions, the strenuous, repeated experimentation that followed her encounter with dansaekhwa still remains palpable, faintly but certainly so, despite the size of the work, which, at 25.5cm tall, is of rather modest proportions for Mitobe.

《Kkachi까치》2025 / plaster and acrylic paint, wood　Photo by Hayato Wakabayashi

When Mitobe graduated from the Tokyo University of Arts’ master’s program, her graduation piece could not be accommodated in the university’s exhibition space and was ultimately left out of the exhibition. The work, consisting of five vertically stacked panels, measured an extraordinary 7.2 meters in height, and given the sheer volume of paint used, the estimated total weight of one ton hardly seems exaggerated. When it was eventually exhibited in the main space of Gallery 21 yo-j (April 25–May 12, 2024), the bottom-most panel had to be left unmounted due to height limitations. It was ultimately not shown in complete form; truly a “falling man,” as promised by the exhibition’s title.
Though the piece has a degree of concrete figuration and could be seen as an experiment in enlarging the face, a motif Mitobe has pursued for many years, what ultimately leaves the stronger impression up close is its abstraction through color and materiality.

《falling man》(a part of the work) 2024 / oil, acrylic, board　Photo by Hayato Wakabayashi

Following these explorations of the heights of bold expression (albeit ultimately exhibited in incomplete form), Mitobe left Japan for South Korea, where she engaged in a quiet, concentrated dialogue with dansaekhwa, a style that, while acknowledged, is not really part of the pantheon of contemporary Korean art.
Successively, the way she presented her work (the “staging”) began to take on an improvisational and intimate quality, like a whisper spoken close to the ear. After seeing the works featured in the second part of the exhibition, I wrote the following:
“Her prolonged encounter with dansaekhwa, arguably one of the origins of contemporary South Korean painting, appears to have made her aware of an impulse to paint black-and-white contrasts that had always lurked within her. The enduring, explosive, even unrestrained energy of her work remains the same. However, in the works she produced since her return to Japan, there is now also a sense of quiet restraint that seems to suspend the act of painting (though that, too, is itself part of the phenomenon of painting).”

《Color of Scales : Blue》2025　oil, pigment, beeswax, canvas　Photo by Hayato Wakabayashi

Color of Scales: Blue, a large-scale painting that could be seen directly through the gallery’s front window, is painted in oil and pigment and features a deep navy color seeping from the same thick, familiar layers of paint as always. But when viewed up close, one notices that the top of the canvas is coated in beeswax, creating the appearance of white powder scattered across the surface. The materials of the painting seem caught in the process of delicately transforming into something else. I wrote:
“There’s a phenomenality of movement to the work; a Coming and Going that overlaps with the figure of the artist herself, who spent years traveling to Austria and South Korea in pursuit of her work.”
With the artist having planned a visit to the United States, I am already anticipating the even more delicate, bold phenomenality that she and her work will soon surely exude.

Tsutomu Mizusawa