There was a moment in life of the young Japanese artists Naritaka Satoh and Taisuke Mohri when they had to make a choice. At stake in this choice was nothing less than reality…

After an exhibition of his work in Taipei, Naritaka Satoh was sitting preoccupied in the company of his artist friends. He was trying to find the way to show that his works – made mainly by pencil, but with meticulous mimetic precision – were not monochrome photos as every visitor to the exhibition had thought, but a painting. Some his friends’ suggestions were pushing him toward provocation and conceptual art (“You should write ’This is a photo!’ at the top of your painting!”), others were pulling him to the tachisme style of expression and abstraction (“You should leave traces of the pencil or pour water on some parts of the drawn figure!”). Satoh rejected their ideas (they seemed like unworthy compromises) and stubbornly continued “unstained mimesis”.

Almost in the same time Mohri, after trying different techniques of working with wood, metal and lacquer at the department of Industrial Art of Tokyo Art University, made his first color-pencil drawing, exhibited it, causing widespread shock: Nobody had ever seen a debut of such high level of technique. (The reclining girl he portrayed had dust under her half-transparent nails; her veins, arteries and tendons drew onlookers into the depth of her flesh; her young wrinkles composed a “skin carpet” on the surface of a sleeping beauty. She was complete – more than complete.)

Nevertheless, Mohri’s friends who were critics were warning him that the empty “copying techniques” cause an artist to become nothing more than a machine, and the surprise of spectators turns this “machine” into “amusement device”. Mohri was advised to stop or to change his way radically. He rejected such advises and obstinately continued “mechanical imitation”.

Both Satoh and Mohri said “No!” and kept their way, but something happened as they moved further into “realistic images” and “naturalistic means of representation”. In fact, they guarded the “imitation”, “mimesis”, “copying techniques” of their work, but the “Realism” of their art was somehow cracked: Satoh and Mohri depict nothing but existing objects and apply nothing, but naturalistic technique, but their works eventually overcome the simple representation of existing entity. It looks as if, after the attempt to pull these artists from the path of a mimesis into pure fiction, they moved back to “reality”, but while making this backward movement went too far into it. They “jumped reality over”, “overran the natural” with their obstinate scrupulosity and eventually found themselves at a place where what presents itself as being realistic was presenting itself too much, a place of surplus of reality,; in other words, at the place of it’s Extra. (I still distinctly remembering hearing the voice of a visitor who said “It’s real to the point of … disgust!” while standing in front of one of Mohri’s work that presents just a “face”. And I still clearly remember an art collector who stepped away from a painting of Satoh’s with a wincing expression on his face, and expressed shock and anxiety observing the artwork, which depicts nothing but a “baby”.)

As soon as Satoh and Mohri said “No!” to anti-mimetic techniques – in spite of the risk of turning into simple coping machines – as soon as they pushed imitation to the degree where a copy loses its connection with the original/model, the art of these two artists immediately got into the crossroad of numerous traditions, epistemological problems and anthropological phenomenon. Let’s point to some of them and, since everything is so intricate and obscure here – well, of course, we are talking about reality and its representation, aren’t we – let us make a list:

1. “It is no longer the myths which need to be restricted … it is the sign which must be shaken; the problem is not to reveal the (latent) meaning of an utterance, of a trait, of a narrative, but to fissure the very representation of meaning, it is not to change or purify the symbol, but to challenge the symbolic itself.” (Roland Barthes; 1971) This is exactly what constitutes the challenge of Satoh and Mohri, while connecting their work with the “theories of representation” and criticism. Their artistic action occurs not in the dimension of imaginary “depth” of the visual symbol, somewhere behind it, but in the very surface of the visible body. They do not play with the references and symbolization, but “fissure the very representation” either with excessive details or with the overwhelming artificiality of drawn objects.
2. The above mentioned quotation by Roland Barth actually appears in the monograph of Gottfried Helnwein as an epigraph for the article “The Artist as Provocateur” by Peter Selz, which starts with the analysis of distinction between Helnwein and photo realist Malcolm Morley. This link provokes further discussions that connect Satoh and Mohri with issues of art history. Since both Satoh and Mohri are (historically) “external” to above mentioned art movements, they take their own stand in relation to Photorealism (of the 1960-70s) and Hyperrealism (of the ‘90s) as well as, for example, the Naturalistic painting of Russian Realism of the 19th century and so on, and this stand is definitely worth analysis. Their work triggers discussions on the relationship between mimesis and provocation (back to Helnwein), as well as the “cult effect” of those artists who overrun Nature in the creation of realistic pictures, leading to an analysis of the broader mythological field, such as the creation of “Golem”, “Frankenstein”, etc.
3. “It is the sign which must be shaken” says the author of “Empire of Signs”, and this leads us to the field of Japanese aesthetic tradition. The above mentioned “will to copy” of Satoh and Mohri, their intention to hold to the “path of imitation”, which paradoxically does not diminish the “personal” in their paintings, takes us to the phenomenon of creation in Japanese art. As well as reference to Photorealism, to continue analysis of these two artists, we could use the link with “utsushi” (the process of copying the works of a teacher) in Japanese culture, which is the main way to become an artist (both in painting and calligraphy).
4. Next, we should stress the significance of “the choice of the artist” again. The choice was, of course, existential and conceptual, but at the same time simply educational. In fact, there are plenty of young artists in Japan who have a high level of drawing technique. More than that, it is well known that scrupulosity, precision and the “talent to copy” are some of the general features not only of Japanese art, but the culture in general. Young Japanese artists who present naturalistic painting sooner or later understand that “representational precision” is not enough. They are usually told that their works lack “content”. In search of this “content,” they rush into fiction, for example referring to mythological motives or painting pop characters and so on. The point is that Satoh and Mohri could find the value (“content”) of their art without leaving the field of realistic depiction and existing objects and at the same time overcome simple Realism and the presentation of something that is not a part of reality. If we define (for a moment) “fiction” as something that doesn’t belong to reality, than we can say that works of Satoh and Mohri are “naturalistic paintings with the powers of fiction”. In other words, Satoh and Mohri went to the opposite direction in relationship to those artists who switched to “plain mythology”, and thus raised deeper issues of representation of both reality and the inexistent. This is what makes them a case model and makes them deserve broader attention.