Rei Naito was born in Hiroshima, Japan in 1961 and graduated from the Musashino Art University in Tokyo in 1985, the same year she exhibited her work Une place sur la terre (One place on the Earth) at the Sagacho Exhibit Space: this installation introduced and established Naito in the contemporary Japanese art world. From very early on Naito developed her art practice in two corresponding fields: installation and drawing. Her drawings may be thought of as personal visual extensions that act collectively as an intellectual skin around her artistic production. The series of drawings titled 'Namenlos' commenced in 1989 and the 'namenlos/Licht' series began in 1993. The first works are rendered in coloured pencil and oil pastel on white typewriter paper. This choice of paper reflects a characteristic of much of Naito's work. The thinness of the paper incorporates a translucence that belies the toughness of a paper designed for commercial use. This coexistence of toughness that sits just beneath preciousness is a thread that continues through Naito's works. The first drawings made in the 'Namenlos' series are in red or blue, with the organic and abstract shapes drawn by Naito's fingers, scratching the wet pastel and pencil pigments into the paper. Sometimes they appear like stains, but also as automatic marks made quickly, to suggest forms that lie dormant in the subconscious recesses of the mind. They all draw on the 'feminine', a sense of interior worlds, of a preciousness and softness.

In the drawing namenlos/Licht Naito uses red pencil that has been blown and pressed into the paper. The just visible red rim circles the void, a void that glows with white light. The collective title of namenlos means 'no name' and implies solitude of being that is not defined by naming, or the abstract notion of 'nothingness'. The title also includes the word licht, meaning 'light'. Light encompasses, emanates, glows, illuminates: 'namenlos' and 'licht', 'nothingness' and 'light' are combined as abstracted entities made visible in this drawing. In an article on the 'namenlos' series curator and writer Alexandra Munro brings to the reading of Rei Naito's work the significance of the surrealist Andre Breton's 'absolute automatism'. Munro draws out the notion that Naito follows in the steps of artists such as Yayoi Kusama (represented in the Queensland Art Gallery's Collection) who not only instinctively apply marks but also draw on a feminine subconscious.(1) The connection to Kusama is important, for Naito belongs to small group of Japanese female artists who have strategically structured their visual practice through consistently drawing on their gender as source. In namenlos/Licht, the shaded red defines an opening, the pigment barely staining the paper making for the light-filled centre.

1. Munro, Alexandra. Rei Naito. Gallery NW House, Tokyo, 1995, unpaginated.