Souzou: Outsider Art from Japan @ Wellcome Collection

Souzou: Outsider Art from Japan

Thursday 28 March 2013 – Sunday 30 June 2013

wellcomecollection.org

Souzou is a word which has no direct equivalent in English but a dual meaning in Japanese: written in one way – 創造 – it means creation and in another – 想像 – imagination. Both meanings allude to a force by which new ideas are born and take shape in the world. In the context of this exhibition, Souzou refers to the practice of 46 self-taught artists living and working within social welfare facilities across Japan.

The phrase ‘Outsider Art’ is an imperfect approximation of another term that does not translate comfortably into English. Coined by British academic Roger Cardinal in 1972, ‘Outsider Art’ follows French artist Jean Dubuffet’s theory of art brut, formulated in the mid-1940s, meaning a ‘raw art’, ‘uncooked’ or uncontaminated by culture. ‘Outsider Art’ has since become an internationally recognised term, commonly used to describe work made by artists who have received little or no tuition but produce work for the sake of creation alone, without an audience in mind, and who are perceived to inhabit the margins of mainstream society. The artists in this exhibition have been diagnosed with a variety of different cognitive, behavioural and developmental disorders or mental illnesses, and are residents or day attendees of specialist care institutions.

Outsider Art has followed different trajectories in Europe and Japan. In Europe, it developed in tandem with the discipline of psychiatry, with a handful of doctors collecting their patients’ works as diagnostic aids from the 1850s onwards. Most notably, in his 1922 study Artistry of the Mentally Ill, the German art historian turned psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn laid the foundations of a theory in which the works were judged as potent creative acts in and of themselves rather than being symptomatic of illness. Around the same time, those in avant-garde artistic circles, such as the Surrealists, began to take an active interest in what they saw as expressions of the subconscious by psychiatric patients, children and so-called ‘primitive’ non-Western cultures. These factors contributed to Dubuffet’s anti-establishment ideology of art brut and coincided with developments in psychiatry after World Wars I and II, including the rise of art therapy and occupational therapy, which were pioneered during the treatment of shell-shocked soldiers… (from the introduction, continue reading)

Ryoko Koda, Untitled, 1990-2000 circa

Shota Katsube, Untitled, 2011

Takashi Shuji, Telephone and Water Jug and Roller, 2010

Masao Obata, Untitled (wedding)

Ryosuke Otsuji, Okinawan lion, 2010

Kenichi Yamazaki, Inersion