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Monika Bincsik Diane and Arthur Abbey Associate Curator for Japanese Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
One of the highlights of The Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition, Japanese Bamboo Art: The Abbey Collection which opened in June 2017 was a large-scale installation created by Tanabe Chikuunsai IV. The dynamic sculpture entitled The Gate occupied the entrance of the Arts of Japan Galleries and served as a visual invitation for the visitors to enter the world of Japanese bamboo art (fig. 1).
Roberta Smith noted in her New York Times review of the show:
So you don’t miss the contemporary angle, the Met commissioned Tanabe Chikuunsai IV, a fourth-generation bamboo artist born in 1973, to create an installation piece that looms over the entrance to the show. The Gate, as it is called, is two thick entwined coils that twist upward from the floor and spread out along the ceiling. Their scale is imposing; they evoke twin baby cyclones or, less violent, the bifurcated trunk of an ancient banyan tree, but their open-weave, light-colored Tiger bamboo is semi-transparent and sort of weightless. These forms have an animated-cartoon energy and snap; they cavort almost wickedly. Throughout the exhibition you will see basketry abstracted, deconstructed and all but exploded in the hands of successive generations of artists. In 1975 Tanabe Yota (1944–2008), a younger brother of Tanabe Chikuunsai III, created Earth Dedicated to Children, a low-lying mountain (or volcano) form that looks like a miniature earthwork, or maybe a model for James Turrell’s Roden Crater.
Bamboo Japanese-Style, From Dynastic Masters of the Art By Roberta Smith, The New York Times, Aug. 3, 2017
2017 was a special year for the young artist as he officially took the name which represents the transmission of the family traditions: he became Tanabe Chikuunsai IV. It coincided with the celebration of the generous gift of more than seventy bamboo baskets and contemporary works from Diane and Arthur Abbey to The Met, so it seemed very felicitous to invite Tanabe to create The Gate as the entry-piece of the Museums’s first bamboo art exhibition. I wanted to convey the feeling of walking through a bamboo grove by entering the gallery and at the same time to demonstrate that Japanese bamboo art is still alive represented by a young generation looking for new ways of expression and constantly expanding the boundaries of the genre. Tanabe installed the work in six days, with the help of his two assistants, both talented young women. The process of the installation itself seemed to be a beautifully choreographed and coordinated performance which we recorded as a time-lapse video, accessible on the Museum’s website. The organic shape of the two intertwined “branches” or “tunnels” and the complex structure of the plaited “ceiling” was admired by more than 430,000 visitors in New York. When Tanabe deinstalled The Gate in February 2018, several of the Museum’s security guards told me that they were really going to miss this piece – a real compliment. The strips of the beautiful and rare tiger bamboo will be reused again in another installation.
The Japanese Bamboo Art exhibition featured more than ninety works dating from the late 19th century to the present, a period when basketry became recognized as an art form and transcended being a “craft,” focusing on the key stages in the modern history of the art form, emphasizing the turning points. The exhibition was divided into three sections, each representing a major bamboo production area: Kansai, Kantō, and Kyūshū. In the Kansai section, highlighting the traditions of the Chinese-style (karamono) basketry, the history of the Tanabe family was represented by fourteen works, including a piece by Tanabe Chikuunsai I (1877–1937), Wada Waichisai I (1851–1901), and selected works by all three generations of the family as well as by Tanabe Yōta (1944–2008) (fig. 2).
Tanabe Chikuunsai IV is one of the most talented and versatile bamboo artists of his generation. He carries on the Tanabe family tradition after the death of his father, while also experimenting with combining lacquer (urushi) art and bamboo as well as monumental sculpture and “organic” installations. His works and large-scale installations exhibited widely in Europe, the United States, recently in the Japan House in São Paulo, and in Asia have received numerous awards, including a prize at the 2015 Kinki Regional Traditional Art Crafts Exhibition for Setting Sail (Boat-Shaped Flower Basket) which was displayed at The Met (fig. 3).
The collection of Diane and Arthur Abbey is characterized by its broad representation of many notable bamboo masters, including all the artists designated by the Japanese government as Living National Treasures. The Abbey Collection will join an earlier gift to The Met from Edward C. Moore (1827–1891), the renowned chief designer of Tiffany & Co., who in 1891 bequeathed to the Museum a collection that included nearly eighty bamboo baskets as well as Japanese textiles, ceramics, and metalwork. The Abbeys began collecting Japanese bamboo art in 1999 inspired by the exhibition of the Lloyd Cotsen Collection at the Asia Society, New York, with the modest ambition of adding a few exceptional pieces to their holdings of postwar art. A few soon became many, as the Abbeys immersed themselves in the rarefied world of Japanese bamboo craft and settled into the serious business of becoming dedicated collectors. In the promised gift from the Abbeys to The Met all four generations of the Tanabe Chikuunsai lineage are represented. The appreciation of Japanese bamboo art by growing numbers of Western collectors and museum audiences might serve as encouragement to the young artists carrying on the traditions of this ancient craft.