We may imagine a young Hiroshi Ōnishi in 2003, arriving in a war-torn Afghanistan and checking into a Kabul hotel that had been recently bombed in a terrorist attack. Having recently been appointed as a full-time instructor at the Tokyo University of the Arts and taking part in the university’s ongoing surveys of Afghani arts, the 42-year old artist must have been excited about the upcoming object survey and on arriving for the first time to a place that must have seemed exotic, as well as dangerous, to him. Little did he suspect that this was the moment when a chance visit to the hotel gift shop would change his life and the world of modern Japanese painting.

In this shop, a glass vitrine displayed a piece of lapis lazuli stemming from the age-old mines from the remote Afghan Badakhshan province – the rock, as it glistened in the shop lights, must have called to him, speaking with its own distinctive voice. Not only of the deep blue colors that had fascinated people for millennia, from ancient Egypt to the Medici’s of Florence, when rulers paid a king’s ransom to obtain samples from the Sar-e-sang mines, but perhaps also of the wide range of exquisite objects that had been decorated with lapis lazuli, of the histories and the legends related to this rare mineral that, to the ancient world, had only been available in this far-away location. It is also likely that there was something in the colors that spoke to him in a deeper way, connecting it with a body of art that he had created in the past – all done with meticulous attention to colors. For the stone must surely have spoken to the imagination and emotions, as well as to the intellect, of this young artist.

The stone also spoke to him as a Japanese national. As he wrote later, he thought of it as “… a new color that the Japanese have never seen” and perhaps saw it as his mission to bring the stone and its shades back to Japan, in order to enrichen the Japanese artist’s palette of colors.

Whatever ran through his mind and emotions at this moment, he decided to bring as much of the stone back with him to Japan as humanly possible. And in addition, he later went back to Afghanistan in search of even more samples of the mineral. With these materials he started a long and strenuous quest to capture the various shades of colors in the stone and to make them available to artists, in all the variations of the lapis lazuli blue. As we know, he was able to do this with the help of his colleagues, and was able to bring these shades to production, changing the art world of Japan with exciting new possibilities in blue colors. Not only did he experiment with possibilities for painting in Nihonga styles, but he experimented endlessly with new formats, media, and constructions. His monumental series of fusuma sliding doors is a case in point, as are his remarkable tea ceramics that glisten with the dark blue that he had brought back from the mountains of Afghanistan.

Yet there is another association that becomes apparent in a poem that he wrote in November, 2010, while in the middle of the successes brought out through his experimentations, and a few months before he passed away in a tragic accident on the Biwa Lake. The untitled poem goes as follows:

As a color, in the middle of a structure

Evoking images and when

The colors themselves become a place,

An experience like seeing a landscape.

Images that one knows

as experiences in nature.

Scenes from nowhere,

but somewhere.

The distance and reality of memory.

A moment in time that leads to eternity.

As if it were being born, as if rising up

as an image of color.

Such moments

evoke landscapes of the mind.

Hiroshi Onishi, 15.11.2010

The poem seems to be an homage to lapis lazuli, and describes an exploration of the artist’s relationship with the mineral and its colors that created; colors that to him formed a landscape of the mind. We may see this landscape in his works, whether on the small sale in the tea ceramics or in the large compositions in shades of blue. It is surely also what tied him to his life-long hobby of fishing on the azure surfaces of Lake Biwa and the wider Pacific Ocean, as he sailed in the middle the vast expanses of blue in all its shades and variations. This “moment in time that leads to eternity” seems to have been the blue that connected a precious mineral to his experimentations, his art, and to his life-long adventures on large bodies of water. A moment in time that is both somewhere and everywhere – eternity as seen in a blue rock glistening in a gift shop vitrine.

This fascination with the universal is something that marked many Japanese artists of his generation and earlier. Unsatisfied with staying within their own culture and following the traditions of Japanese art, these artists, whether Yōko Ono, Inoue Yuichi, or Ōnishi Hiroshi, strove to discover wider understandings outside the narrow confines on their own culture. For the young Ōnishi, born in a small Shikoku Island town, this meant a deep submergence into the arts of the geographically and historically remote Northern Renaissance, resulting in close studies of Dürer, Bosch, van Eyck and other artists of the period, and culminating in a deeply influential stay at the Nuremberg Academy in Germany. Ōnishi was too sophisticated as an artist to simply make pastiches; he made the art his own through his own interpretations, as we see in his early self-portrait paintings.

Yet he was ultimately unsatisfied with close connection to older artists, and we see him endlessly experimenting with other styles during the following years after his return from Germany until the moment of the serendipitous discovery in Kabul. During this period of restless experimentation we see one constant: the connection to life on water. Whether this connection is evoked through depiction of waves, studies of fish, or through the uses of luminous shades of blue, the connection to the sea is almost always there in some form or another. It is possible that this preoccupation with water and its colors was part of what drew him to lapis lazuli when he saw the mineral for the first time.

For Ōnishi, the deep engagement with lapis lazuli provided a mechanism for successfully combining the global with traditional Japanese elements, as he produced art work that combined the Afghan colors with familiar Japanese formats, such as the sliding doors and tea ceramics.

His relationship to the tea ceremony is particularly interesting, as his tea ceramics converse on various levels with the principles of the ceremony. Originally an integral part of the Zen Buddhist monastic experience, ritualized tea drinking and the Japanese tea ceremony represents a striving for harmony, purity and tranquility, creating links to the eternal through ordinary movements and object, goals that were likewise important for Ōnishi. The ideal of the tea ceremony – as well as Zen Buddhism – was to reach a higher level of spiritual awareness through ordinary acts, such as drinking tea. As stated by the tea master Sōshitsu Sen XV, “Served with a respectful heart and received with gratitude, a bowl of tea satisfies both physical and spiritual thirst.” Ōnishi’s tea ceramics are not just covered with glazes in shades of blue, they provide deeper connections to global movements, historical cultural narratives, as well as symbolic meanings such as the landscapes of the mind. The addition of lapis lazuli carved from Afghan mines halfway across the world, changes the meaning of the ceramics in a fundamental way: through this act they become objects in which the local and global are combined in moments of profound beauty, giving glimpses of the eternal through sips of tea.

The artist passed away at the pinnacle of his achievements and his arts. But we are left with significant works of art, such as the monumental set of twelve sliding doors at the Tenjūan in the Nanzenji Temple and the works we see surrounding us in this exhibition. Thanks to the careful curatorship of his wife Martina Ōnishi, his achievements have been carefully preserved for the rest of us to see. It is my hope that, just as Ōnishi saw the eternal within a rock placed in a gift shop vitrine, we will be able to trace the spiritual and the eternal in the inspired works that came from his brush.