Tsuguo Yanai is emblematic of a generation of Japanese artists trained in atelier-based techniques, who pursued innovation in the liberating atmosphere resulting from Mono-ha’s rejection of medium specificity. Originally a printmaker, in the early 1980s, Yanai lost interest in the process and began instead to explore its support — paper. From the beginning, he created his own, which was very different from conventional paper: he used hemp as his foundation. Typically, papermaking is achieved through a so-called wet process, where moist fibres are compressed and then dried. Yanai developed an alternative dry process in which hemp fibres are placed in a mould then solidified with starch or latex to produce a relatively flexible material.

When the artist suffered temporary partial blindness in the early 1990s, he reflected on the privileging of vision of the five senses, and the myriad forces that make up what is invisible to human consciousness. He understood these forces to be operating within natural objects, which were sustained in the transformation of these objects into functional materials. Thus, the conventions of printmaking were displaced in the artist’s practice in favour of a fidelity to materials, with Yanai opting to describe himself as a fibre artist, enabling fluid movement between two-dimensional media, such as printing and drawing, and three-dimensional work in sculpture and installation, where the constant is the material, rather than the form of the expression.

An example of Yanai’s approach was seen in his contribution to the ‘First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ in 1993, with his work Numen – spirit of tree 1991. A large, multi-part installation that transformed the space in which it was presented, this piece was typical of much of the artist’s oeuvre in linking the idea of paper with its origins in plants and trees, thus suggesting its connection with the spirit of life itself. The tall, cascading structures comprising the installation were organic in form, betraying the degree to which the artist allowed the physical properties of his material to dictate the work’s composition, while their serial nature replicated the orderly logic of the plant world.

In a similar way, Yanai’s prints and drawings employ their paper support within the composition; indeed, the fibres of the paper appear to influence the flow of line and shape. As ink floods the paper in the lithographs of Yanai’s ‘Protoplasm’ series, whose title evokes the cellular structure of all life, individual fibres swell and bleed, creating the sense that the image is not so much on the paper as within it. Shapes in earthy tones of rust, ochre and pitch are formed by wandering lines whose edges are difficult to determine without close investigation. They seem to both rise from and merge with the highly textured surface, before being overlaid and framed by opaque washes that drip across the plane, creating an unlikely depth of field.

By emphasising the physical characteristics of his materials, Tsuguo Yanai emphasises their presence, suggesting that for all the abstract pictorial qualities of his works, they possess an essentially sculptural aspect as well.