The Surrealist artist Kikuji Yamashita (1919-1986) has produced arguably the most poignant works in Japan’s postwar art history. As part of the 1950s reportage movement, he advocated critically charged painting practices themed in Japan’s political realities. With unsettling Surrealist sensibility and strikingly direct depictions of blood and violence, Yamashita has famously created monumental oils that poignantly reveal the various ‘anxious bodies’ under the promise of ‘New Japan’—in its unresolved Imperialist legacy, its radical modernisation that brutally shattered individual beings, and its continual political flirting with the United States. i
An ominous portrayal of a soldier squeezed by two monstrous creatures, Omaemoka expresses Yamashita’s continual concerns about the country’s fate in the overwhelming swirl of historical tensions. Dated in 1969, it was produced at a time when hope and confidence seemed to displace discontent: after the turbulent 1950s characterised by revolts and protests, Japan had reclaimed its economic strength and national solidarity through the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, meanwhile marching toward the 1970 Osaka Expo. However, reiterating the disturbing motifs of Imperialism possessed by mysterious external forces, Omaemoka dropped a discordant note against the optimism permeating Japanese society. The distorted figurative form is tellingly a metaphor for the country haunted by the lingering specter of its militarist past while losing to new authorities (namely the United States). Stylistically, piecing together three different imageries, the chimeric composite reflects Yamashita’s turn from oil painting to collage, with which the artist would go on to give some of his most radical critiques directed toward Japan’s emperor system.
Emblematic of Japanese Surrealism and reportage style, Yamashita’s work has been housed and exhibited in major institutions in and outside Japan, including National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura, Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Tate Modern, London. He is the subject of the 1976 documentary film The Crumbling Swamp: Painter Kikuji Yamashita. More recently, his paintings are featured in the documentary ANPO: Art X War in 2010.