Toshiko okanoue biography of michael

Bizarre photo collages are foremost in the oeuvre of Toshiko Okanoue, an avant-garde artist who enjoyed a peak of activity in the 1950s before she gave art a backseat to her family life.

"Toshiko Okanoue, Photo Collage: The Miracle of Silence" at the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum provides a thorough introduction to Okanoue's various areas of creativity.

She playfully cut out various image fragments from pictorial and fashion magazines like LIFE, VOGUE and Harper's Bazaar and combine different faces, body parts and animals together.

Although her works were discovered by famous surrealist artist and critic Shuzo Takiguchi and well acclaimed by the public, her collage production ended 6 years after she started from when she was 22 years old.

However in 1996 her works were displayed in Meguro Museum of Art and her solo exhibition, namely, "Toshiko Okanoue's Photo Collages: Droplets of Dreams" was held in Dai-ichi Mutual Life Insurance Co. South Gallery. Early works of this type are strikingly graphic and stark, with various photographic elements from magazines (often Harper's Bazaar, Vogue and Life) pasted against a plain backdrop.

Born in 1928, Kochi Prefecture, Okanoue was raised in Tokyo.

She began to make photo collages while she was studying fashion design and drawing in Bunka Gakuin in the early 1950s. However, as with many Japanese women of this era, her marriage in 1957 ended her artistic career.

Okanoue returned to her hometown of Kochi, where she now lives. Her work faded into obscurity and was overlooked for almost 40 years.

She thought of her works as a form of hari-e (‘hari’ meaning pasting and ‘e’ meaning a picture in Japanese), a traditional Japanese technique of making pictures by pasting small pieces of coloured paper onto pasteboard.

It was only in 1952, upon meeting the poet and artist Shuzo Takiguchi, that Okanoue found her own place in art history. Although the component parts of her collages originated from Western sources, Okanoue herself regarded her technique of image making as deeply rooted in Japanese tradition.

It follows, but is more complete than, an exhibition last year at the Museum of Art Kochi, in her hometown.

Okanoue was interested in fashion as a child and later went on to study design at Bunka Gakuin, a Tokyo college, in 1950.

Takiguchi was a leading figure of the Surrealist movement in Japan, and introduced Okanoue to the works of the famous Surrealist, Max Ernst, whose style had a decisive influence on her. In "A Rut" (1951), a woman's torso merges with a wheel, and her leg transforms into that of an animal, perhaps a horse. Okanoue used fragments from Western fashion magazines such as Life, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, to create radical compositions combining body parts, animals and inanimate objects in dynamic arrangements.

When she first began working, she had very little art historical knowledge, and knew nothing of the Surrealist movement.

In post-war Japan, a shortage of goods and materials meant the country was flooded with commodities from foreign countries. In some works the human face, usually a woman's, is kept intact, but other parts of the body, particularly legs, are invariably fragmented and transformed.

However, it was rediscovered by the curator of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in the mid 1990s, and has since gained recognition for its contribution to the Japanese avant-garde.