Introduction
Human figure sculptures that depict people unadorned, painful and yet shining with luster; vessels made in the hope of casting off financial insecurity; and abstract works born while I was exploring the relationship between this world and the next after facing death. All of these works are bound together by a single rope. What I want to convey through my work is this: all things are made of opposing elements, what we can see with our eyes is only a tiny part, and in every era every person surely seeks love and peace, so I want to make works that help with that, works that enrich the heart, and works that can be left to the next generation.
Chapter 12010–
Life-cast Ceramic Figure Sculpture
It began in San Francisco
I, Hijiri Tougane, grew up in a wealthy family. From childhood I was blessed with material abundance, but I was often troubled by my home environment and my relationships with others. I entered an art university in San Francisco and, rather than making “things” the subject of my art, I focused on “people.” Looking back, I think people became the object of my interest precisely because I had difficulty understanding how people feel.
What led me to the sculpture department was a certain Hellenistic sculpture. Made of cream-colored marble, it shook me, then a student, and moved me deeply. Though it was a lifeless object, its vividness and power, as if it might start to move at any moment, and the sense of presence, as if a person who had existed in the past were here with me in this very place, struck my heart. Touched by the wonder of sculpture that crosses eras to move new generations, I resolved to make sculptures that could move the hearts of those who see them.
Searching for a material in which my work could keep on remaining, I came upon “ceramics,” a material that lasts thousands of years. Ceramics was also well suited to depicting the message I wanted to leave. What I wanted to depict in sculpture was that “the very scars that arise along the path of life are beauty, and the proof of a person who shines with strength.” In pursuit of vividness, the method I chose was the “press-mold method”: plaster is applied directly to a living person to take a mold, and clay is pressed into it to build the work. For the glaze I chose a “glossy crackle glaze,” whose surface cracks spread and deepen over the years.
In choosing the people who would be my subjects, I avoided reasons such as their having left great achievements, or simply being good-looking. I am not a sculptor who makes bronze statues of great figures or nobles. If a creature lives with life in it, it will surely face hardship. Even someone financially blessed must have worries that others do not understand. I believe that the very fact that every person and every living thing lives always side by side with death is something moving for this universe. “Living now.” I believe that this alone is enough for anyone to become a sculpture. Like the “sculpture of an old woman” shaped in the Hellenistic period, I wanted to leave in my work the people close to me whom I meet, just as they are. This is how I, as a student, set my direction as a sculptor.
When I first began making human figure sculptures, I gave no thought at all to how my work would sell, not the slightest thought to who would buy it, and simply kept making large-scale works. Looking back, I think this was because, though I had carried troubles of the heart since childhood, I had never faced any financial hardship until then.
Chapter 22014–
Teacups & Saucers
After returning to Japan, from Tokyo to the land of Mino ware in Gifu Prefecture
Making teacups after returning to Japan, while suffering financial hardship
In 2012, because of the economic crisis in America, I suddenly lost my right to stay in the United States, and I, whose career as an artist there had already been settled, was overcome by a sense of loss. It happened just as I, who since childhood had often felt that “I am not needed,” had become able to be active in America and at last to affirm myself.
After returning to Tokyo, to fill that sense of loss, I began to go out often into Tokyo’s nightlife, using the living expenses my parents sent me out of their love for their daughter. My aspirations and hopes as an artist, and my gratitude to those who supported me, were lost, and I was swallowed up by pleasures that could not last. Amid all this, a certain incident led my parents to disown me, and in an instant I lost everything and fell into financial hardship. I was 22 at the time. Never having worked, I had no idea at all how to earn money. On a friend’s recommendation I took a job in the night trade, but the harsh environment meant it did not last long.
Forced to leave the city, I was lucky enough to move into a house I found deep in the mountains of Kanagawa, standing since before the war and looking as if it might collapse at any moment. Because of money and the distances involved, I drifted apart from the friends I had seen in my city days, and the days alone came to make me doubt even the existence of my own life.
Then one day, for the first time, I came upon the scene of a terrible accident. Perhaps it had only just happened: there was a single police officer on a bicycle, and on a road turned into a sea of blood, only a wrecked motorcycle and the lower half of a person. I remember being suddenly enveloped in sadness. A bitter feeling, as if saying “I still wanted to live,” surged over me, yet it felt quite different from my own emotions. A few days later, when I went to the scene, laid flowers and put my hands together, for some reason I felt very gentle, and even a sense of refreshment. I, who had been shut away in gloom ever since moving to Kanagawa, changed from that day on.
As soon as I got home, I opened my computer and searched for where in Japan I could go to face ceramics seriously once again. Before long, I had made my way from Kanagawa to the land of Mino ware in Gifu Prefecture. It was the autumn of 2014.
Even after moving to Gifu, my financial hardship did not change, so I decided that here, above all, I would make “things” that would lead to money. Making palm-sized vessels with a use was suited to that. To make vessels no one had ever seen, that might corner a market, I used what was then cutting-edge 3D modeling and deliberately designed cups that would be difficult to make on the wheel. For the motif I chose a woman with delicate curves. Turning away from the plain human figure sculptures, I took in designs that arranged the luxurious furniture of splendid medieval Europe in a modern way, as tools with which people adorn themselves. For the glazes I ordered expensive raw materials from abroad, and for the finish I decided to use divine pure gold lavishly.
From the printed-out designs I made molds so the pieces could be reproduced, and went on making my works as products. However, the development costs were higher than expected, and because I had designed such complex forms, I struggled with the forming. In the end, contrary to my original plans, I could make only a few pieces a month, and even though the selling price was based on cost, it ended up being expensive for a Mino ware vessel. Having no connections with others in the trade, for some time I spent days far from my ideal, selling the vessels I made by hand to friends and putting the money I earned at part-time jobs toward paying for expensive molds and materials.
My determination that I would surely break through was crushed by the harsh reality I had chosen for myself, having to spend 600,000 yen on the development of every new piece, and I often complained, “Even if I try hard, I can only make about two new pieces a year, so there’s no way I can hold a solo exhibition. I have no choice but to give up being an artist…” By “often” I mean almost every day, for years. I was often jealous of the ceramic artists active around me. With a warped heart, I endured day after day thinking, “This time I won’t give up. If I give up, all that’s left is to die.”
Still, if you keep going in whatever form, a turning point will come. One day in 2017, I received a DM on Instagram from a gallery with a distribution network in China. From then on, they bought as many vessels as I made. New development gained momentum, I was able to make more pieces, the solo exhibition that had seemed only a dream came true, and my vessel making was at last on track.
Chapter 32018–
Large Abstract Sculptures and Paintings Shaped After the Soul
My curiosity turns from people and things to the world after death
News came from my family, from whom I had become estranged. It was news that my father’s life was in danger. That I had been able to wish so strongly to go to Gifu and start my life over was also because I regretted the day I left home in a way that betrayed the expectations of the father who had done so much for me. Coming just as I was close to leaving proper results as an artist, the news shook me badly. The surgery my father was to undergo came with no guarantee of survival. Without realizing it, I was thinking through the worst scenario that could happen.
“Is there a world after death? I think there is. I have reason to think so.” I immediately got hold of a certain thing: a first-generation Panasonic IC recorder introduced by a YouTuber living in America who is famous as a psychic. Its production had been stopped soon after its release, and it was said to record, of all rare things, “the voices of people from the other world.” Since childhood, and even well into adulthood, I had had what are commonly called spiritual experiences, so I had never thought about them in particular, but my father’s situation started me on an exploration of the world after death.
The IC recorder I obtained answered my curiosity. I ended up recording a strange “voice of a man without a body.” I remember that when I first played back the recording, I wept with joy. I gave thanks out loud: “Thank you!!” This would surely be a big step toward proving the world after death, and I thought that I might be able to tell my father, who feared death at that very moment, that death is not the end. So whatever kind of being the invisible man who helped with the recording might be, I was grateful from the bottom of my heart.
I went on to ask to be taught the truths of this world, such as the meaning of existence in this world and its relationship with the world after death. And after that, an answer came back again. At bedtime, when I lay down to go to sleep, a scene like a universe sparkling with thousands of stars, or rather a world like a moving image, spread out before my eyes. In that space, pairs of opposing keywords rose up: light and shadow, black and white, life and death, love and desire, matter and space, male and female. And finally, the “Taijitu” appeared large before me.
At the time I understood the Taijitu only as some kind of hippie symbol or the like, but when I looked it up later I learned for the first time that it means “all things in heaven and earth exist through the balance of yin and yang.”
If we speak on the premise that humans have independent souls of their own, I felt that love is something like the main element of the world after a person’s death, and that the world after death, where a soul raised in a body arrives when that body has finished its role in a natural way, is overflowing with love. Desire is an element that reigns over this world, and life is nurtured by being able to find love in such a world.
Just as within a human there are osteoclasts and osteoblasts, on Earth too there are lives that end and lives that are born. And there are universes that begin and universes that end. An image rose within me that this universe, in which the Earth exists, is no more than something like a single human being or living being, and that the souls of humans and living things are, to it, a kind of cell.
When life runs out, we return to a single world without barriers, made up of the loving souls of living beings that have died. The information each gathered while living as a living being then becomes nourishment for that world’s growth. Returning to oneness means that the concept of oneself as an individual disappears, but it means realizing that, in order to notice that one was one all along, one is simply going to a world without any worry, where, without passing through time or space, one is already touching the people and places one has loved.
If one is not ready to return there, naturally the moment of leaving the body may seem frightening, but I came to feel that at such a time those who went before will surely come warmly to meet you, and that by the time you reach the place you came from, you will be filled with relief and nostalgia. Put the other way around, precisely because after death there is no “world of one’s own,” one could say that, in whatever form, we must face our “self” fully and live “now” with all our might. This life is that chance.
I felt that if, in a moment of confusion, one ends one’s own life, one is shaken by the sudden event of “returning to oneness,” and though one tries to shake off those who have come to meet one and go back to the body, crying “I want to be myself a little longer after all!”, there is no body, no vessel, to return to, so only the soul stays in that place, wandering without peace. So please don’t give up until the very end… That is the kind of unscientific thing I told my father, no matter what.
I remembered that when I told my father about my spiritual experiences in my teens, he had been dismissive of ideas such as spirits or a world after death, so this time too I began to speak without much hope. Seeing me speak timidly, my father seemed to listen at least a little. I asked him to listen to the voice I had recorded, but he found it creepy and would not listen then and there, so later I sent it to him attached to an email, but I still don’t know whether he listened to it. That my father was in better spirits than usual that day was what mattered most to me. Later, the surgery succeeded, and my father was safely discharged from the hospital.
Loving, feeling happiness, rejoicing, being moved, getting angry, stirring up desire, and at times even envying: I feel these are important elements that become nourishment for the growth of the soul, for every person living in any era, and for this universe too. I came to strongly want to make works that become a trigger for these emotions to well up. It could be through the visual, through a hidden concept, through the way it is conveyed, or through my activities; anything is fine. It was after what happened with my father that I came to think this way. I came to see this as my role as an artist, and as a perfectly natural way to use my life.
While writing this, I remembered one thing: the first work I made after crossing to America and setting out to become a sculptor.
Its title is Hata o Warawasu Shiawase (傍を笑わす幸せ).
