E’wao Kagoshima: Morphology of the Animated Mind

In January 1983, the New York Times reported on the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s move from a rented space at 65 Fifth Avenue to the historic Astor Building at 583 Broadway in New York City, where the institution would be located from October of that year through 2007.¹ One week after the news of its future site, the museum inaugurated a new exhibition series, WorkSpace, with three artists Eleanor Dube (b. 1946), E’wao Kagoshima (b. 1945), and Jamie Summers (1948–1983). Aiming to foster the future talents, the museum proposed to offer “an intimate glimpse into the artists’ creative process.”²

Given the complete freedom to “do whatever you want,”³ Kagoshima brought a great number of works from his studio to the museum and orchestrated what amounted to a humongous installation piece, which not only covered the walls but also utilized the ceiling and floor spaces. He even devised a tiny studio with a desk and chair so that he could literally work on-site every day when the exhibition was open. In comparison with Dube’s conceptualist grids and Summers’s restrained display of sculptures, Kagoshima’s packed gallery presented a cacophony of paintings on larger canvases and smaller boards, as well as drawings on all sorts of papers and assemblages of knickknacks. It was as though the artist’s creative imagination had spilled out of his head, while his nimble hands wove his sprawling visions into tangible form. Notably, the environment reveals both his careful preparations (as explained by Robin Dodds in the exhibition brochure⁴) and his improvisational ensemble-makings (as found in the museum’s extensive photographic documentation).

Taken as a whole, Kagoshima’s WorkSpace presentation embodies the morphology of his animated mind, one driven by his unrelenting pursuit of sight unseen, or what can only be called his shinshō (心象),⁵ which can be translated as “forms in the mind” in Japanese. Indeed, throughout his career, he has explored these “forms in the mind,” mixing abstraction and figuration, realism and surrealism, in an indiscriminate and idiosyncratic yet sophisticated manner. At times commenting on the human condition, he is no stranger to humor or eros either, with his vision frequently bordering on the macabre or the bizarre.

The Early Years: From Tokyo to New York

With each artist given their own separate gallery, WorkSpace marked a veritable first solo show in New York for the Japanese-born artist, who had moved from Tokyo to New York in 1976 at the age of thirty-one. Born in Niigata Prefecture facing the Japan Sea, Kagoshima grew up in Tokyo as the second son of a middle-class family. His father was a chauffeur for the Occupation forces and went on to found a taxi company with his colleagues; his mother worked part-time at home as a dressmaker. Having studied metal casting at the national Tokyo University of the Arts,⁶ the young Kagoshima was weary of following the path of a professional craft artist as had his maternal uncle, who specialized in lacquer with the distinction of being a member of the prestigious Nitten salon. “All you need is a solid skill and you are set for life,” his uncle would tell him. “Never ever become a painter. No way you can make a living.” For a few years after his graduation in 1969, the nephew obliged and tried his luck in some freelance design ventures. But these soon proved not to be challenging enough for the ambitious young man, and his desire to become an artist grew too strong to contain. To escape his hopeless homeland, he first tested the waters in London, where he ended up staying for two years in 1972 and 1973, with an excursion to Paris for a couple of weeks. Fortunately, his success as a designer making leather bags and custom jewelry in Tokyo financed his foreign stay, but the language barriers were discouraging, especially British English, as opposed to American English, which he learned in school. In 1976, he decided to go to New York instead.

Before this major shift, however, and despite his uncle’s stern admonition and his family’s objections, Kagoshima kept his interest in art alive. As a student, he had already begun frequenting Ginza, a mere train ride from his school, making the rounds of some galleries and visiting the famed Jena bookstore, which offered the latest art and design books and magazines imported from abroad. What intrigued him then included Pop Art, as reflected in his Stopped Liquid (Cup), his graduation work from 1968; Joseph Cornell, whose use of everyday detritus was a revelation to the Japanese artist; and most importantly, a postwar Austrian movement called the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, which he avidly studied in illustrated publications. The Vienna School was first introduced to Japan by Ginza’s Aoki Gallery in the 1960s, but Kagoshima preferred to see their works in color reproductions. His early figurative paintings reveal the distinct influence of the Viennese painters who combined their surrealistic visions with a meticulous figurative style inflected with Jugendstil and Flemish painting. He had a solo exhibition at Nagai Gallery in Tokyo in 1976 before his departure for New York.⁷

Once in New York, Kagoshima continued to pursue the fantastic, while experimenting with a broad range of styles from expressionism to abstraction. Works of this period attest to his superb drawing skill, innate sense of colors, and knack for improvisational ensemble-making. Of particular note is his exploration of abstract and photo collages around 1980–81. In shuffling and layering diverse types of paper—transparent sheets, shiny foils, translucent tissues, and printed patterns—along with his own drawings, newspaper and magazine clippings, and, occasionally, some tiny or flat objects, he concocted exquisite abstract or semi-abstract patchworks that delight the eyes. With little preconception, the artist apparently reacted to the materials on hand, and a shifting arrangement at any given moment inspired him to fashion the next step. Unlike oil painting, which entails a slow process due to the time needed for paint to dry, the degree of freedom here was immense. A makeshift approach of assembling elements suited the artist’s agile creativity, already in a nascent state in Japan, as seen in his Nagai Gallery catalogue, which included the Saint Shoe series as well as Dragon High Heels, a pair of shoes combined with two taxidermized crocodile babies and spray-painted in metallic green. Kagoshima produced a copious number of these small collages (no larger than letter-sized paper) then made intimate his absorption in the exercise. Some of these collages subsequently served as the basis for full-fledged works on larger sheets (favoring sturdy watercolor sheets as large as 22 x 30 inches). These drawings were part of another of his self-imposed explorations and show him working on a larger scale less expensively and more flexibly than oil on canvas. Some three hundred of them, dating from 1976 to 1982, have recently been recovered. Produced in several different styles and series, including collage-based abstractions, the most unique is a “red and black” series, likely dating from 1981.⁸ He depicted figures in action, many across multiple sheets (two, three, six, and even eighteen) to create a larger format. The description of figures and background elements is abbreviated, cartoon-like, and executed with speedy, thick, and assured strokes. These scenes signal not only another potential in figuration within the artist’s versatile range but also his capacity to envision and realize as large a picture as he desired. The gigantic eighteen-sheet mural demonstrates what a spirited mind and skilled hand can achieve with a medium often considered lesser to painting.

WorkSpace: An Arena for the Animated Mind

By the time he was invited to the inaugural WorkSpace exhibition, Kagoshima must have been ready to work in a large space. As Lynn Gumpert, then the New Museum’s curator in charge of the program, recently recalled, she chose Kagoshima because of his strong desire to pack the space, which she felt would be a good fit for the installation-oriented exhibition format.⁹ And the artist met the curator’s expectation perfectly, as though turning the assigned gallery into an “arena” for his animated mind and ensemble-making. My borrowing of the word “arena” from Harold Rosenberg is not idle. What Kagoshima achieved in exhibition making constitutes an expanded parallel to what the “American Action Painters” did with their art making. In his case, he transformed the gallery (rather than the canvas) into “an arena in which to act.” Although the Japanese artist came to the room with several sets of well-prepared works, once they were put up on the wall, he began to “do something to [those other pieces] of material in front of him,” to paraphrase Rosenberg.¹⁰

Crucial to his New Museum project was a chance discovery of kraft paper, which was used for wrapping merchandise at a hardware store in his neighborhood. Delighted to learn the paper was much less expensive than canvas and sturdy enough to withstand his unconventional treatments, the freewheeling artist acquired a 60-inch-wide roll. He cut the paper into sheets of varying lengths—many as long as or longer than his own height—which were much larger than the largest commercially available drawing sheet he had used in the few years prior. The material offered him a way to explore a realm between drawing and painting. He could achieve an expansive scale and serious iconography while working in acrylic, which is better suited for quick and abbreviated maneuvers than oil. Spraying thinned paint over the paper to create a background was a new technique he extensively used. Drip marks are ubiquitous as well, whether resulting from splaying or loose handling of paint. Finally, the speed of execution was no insignificant matter: the artist recalls how time-consuming it was to complete Peek-a-boo Pageant (1982), a large canvas shown in WorkSpace and made the same year as his works on kraft paper. Stylistically, these kraft drawings saw him mostly shedding the Vienna-influenced fantastic mode, which consisted of belabored realism and complex compositions. Instead, he went for lively drawing techniques he had honed since his arrival in New York. This shift was accompanied by a greater iconographic sophistication, which Robin Dodds attentively examined in her exhibition essay and characterized as “a personalized exposition of the dialectic of opposites—destruction and creation, nature and culture, East and West” and “an effort to recognize and ultimately reconcile or transcend these opposing forces and the tensions they generate.”¹¹

A good number of his kraft drawings have recently been recovered along with the above-mentioned body of drawings on watercolor paper. A memorable example among them is an untitled work featuring an iconic male figure with well-chiseled muscles—reminiscent of the thirteen-century guardian buddhas of the Tōdaiji temple in Nara. The figure floats against a blue background executed mostly by spraying acrylic paint, while his “inner spirit of a wolf,”¹² rendered in broken white lines, emerges from the man like an apparition. Another notable example, G Flat, consists of a subdued, Rothko-like, two-toned color field divided by a row of letters from A to Z. Two words, “FARMER” and “HUNTER,” perpendicularly extend from the row, serving as labels to two figures: the first, seemingly Japanese, plants rice seedlings in a puddy, while the other, of Greco-Roman appearance, draws a bow. They are both executed with a pale charcoal modeling he had developed in his drawing exercises. Inexplicably, a massive hand delineated by perforated tiny round holes is overlaid like a ghost over these figures. The witty or enigmatic use of lettering, a remnant of his interest in Pop Art, can be found in this body of drawings, too. One work bearing a banner that reads “BY NIGHT” shows an emaciated man, drawn in summary lines, uttering the stock phrase of the wrongfully murdered—“urameshiya” (I loathe you!)—from Japanese ghost stories. An untypically fuller untitled composition features a snake and Jizō, a bodhisattva who protects children, accompanied by a wooden wheel on which the cryptic note, “Only $1.49 for 4 tires Complete,” is nailed.

In his WorkSpace presentation, Kagoshima was his own curator and handler. These works on kraft paper enabled him to breach the boundary of medium (painting vs. drawing), as well as the convention of hanging two-dimensional works on the wall. He placed several on the wall like paintings but also stretched wires across the gallery and hung many drawings from them, securing the sheets with clips. Some also overlapped on the floor. In at least one case, he used a stick to lift the bottom corner of a wall-hung, perforated drawing to allow light coming through to make a pattern onto the wall. He further enforced this overall fluidity through his consummate installer’s eye, continuing to assess the state of his gallery practically every day and revising the installation once in a while. In 1945–1982, for instance, the work that served as a symbolic and psychological center of his presentation, Kagoshima alludes to the inseparable nature of life and death, with the year 1945 being one of the most devastating dates in human history (as represented by a rising mushroom cloud) and the year of his own birth.¹³ According to the documentary photographs, he tried at least two different drawings on kraft paper to visually anchor it to the floor.

In his shifting acts of ensemble-making, Kagoshima found that a number of areas remained empty, especially on the floor. He solved this problem by creating playful, impromptu assemblages as the days passed. The streets were a treasure box for the artist who barely scraped by. Walking from his home on Perry Street in Greenwich Village to the New Museum near Union Square, he happened upon such useful trash as a metal side table and a set of lumbers. The side table became a pedestal on which he erected a small canvas, supporting it from behind with a paintbrush. He painted the four pieces of lumber in black and assembled them into a shallow box on the floor, in and around which he arranged small- to medium-sized works. His wall-hung canvases were also subjected to his mischievous handling. The most visible case concerns a suite of ten expressionistic heads, arguably most resonant with the graffiti aesthetics pervading the downtown streets and art scenes. The suite was double hung to occupy the wall from floor to ceiling.¹⁴ He then reinstalled the canvas second from left on the bottom row with its recto facing the wall and tilting it forward so that both sides of the canvas could be seen. (Kagoshima habitually utilized—and still does to this day—the verso of an existing work to create a new one.) Here, the older work on the verso is based on one of his earlier drawing series consisting of two abstract towers, which he obfuscated by inserting a readymade oval canvas board onto the composition. He then placed a drawing on a resulting exposed wall, while laying a round mirror on the floor in front of the tilted canvas to further attract the visitor’s attention.

Diptychs: Picturing Abstract Expressionism

For Kagoshima, WorkPlace was a financial break as well, albeit temporarily. He recalls sixteen of his works were acquired by the Lannan Foundation from the exhibition.¹⁵ Established in 1960 by J. Patrick Lannan, Sr.,¹⁶ the foundation was intended to “give financial help to needy artists and writers.”¹⁷ Kagoshima’s works in the collection were subsequently donated to the Asian American Arts Centre (AAAC) in New York and the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center (JACCC) in Los Angeles. AAAC received three large expressionist Head Paintings, all dating from 1981, among others, and JACCC got the iconic 1945–1982. However, after the New Museum show, as his chronology indicates, the artist had only a small number of solo and group exhibitions through the mid-1990s. During this time, from the late 1980s onward, he worked on a new series that he calls Diptychs. In his words, he “devoted ten years to making three hundreds of them, without thinking about commercial [viability], not thinking about what other people may think.” (About half of them have been lost during a few moves of his home-studio.)

Kagoshima’s Diptychs series is based on an ensemble template he devised in order to examine the quintessential New York movement: Abstract Expressionism. To do so, he turned the movement upside down, if you will, by shrinking and expanding on it at the same time. In the series, each work consists of two 20 x 16-inch canvas boards, cojoined side by side and secured by tape on the back. The artist would first paint the left panel in oil in the style of gestural abstraction, reminiscent of de Kooning’s broad brushes, while paying attention to the elements of color and texture. It is a purely visual give-and-take, which he once characterized as “pure abstraction.” After completion, he would carefully observe the resulting work and gather formal and chromatic clues to picture shinshō, or “forms in his mind,” which he would pair with the “pure abstraction.”¹⁸ Using acrylic, he then made a flat picture of a schematized head with a heart-shaped headdress that encloses his forms in the mind.

In this series, he made it a rule to fashion his “forms in the mind” as an animated scene in nature with birds and animals. On the back of each two-panel work, the title is inscribed in bold brush, serving as an important indicator for his mind images. Many of these reveal his command of short but poetic and humorous English phrases, such as Flamingo Way, White Sunday, and Catch of the Day. The picturing process he devised is a kind of Rorschach test, the result of which we may decipher by comparing the schematic mindscape and the abstraction in terms of form and color. The title sometimes guides our deciphering. In Flamingo Way, noting a flamingo flying in the right panel, we are led to notice irregular daubs of red paint centrally placed in the abstraction, which indeed resembles a flying bird. In White Sunday, the long white ovals found on branches of a splendid pine tree (with a brown gnarl as a trunk on the left panel) are snow patches (represented by spattering white paint). Catch of the Day literally refers to a fish snatched by a black bird of prey, whose vigorous flight is sensed in the whirls of paint executed in typical de Kooning style. The more carefully we study Kagoshima’s Diptychs, the more adept we become in using our own imagination to read gestural abstraction and detect its pictorial nuances.

The whole maneuver was informed by Kagoshima’s familiarity with long cultural traditions of Japan. In shrinking the heroic scale of American Action Painting down to the size of a miniature, he followed the Japanese aesthetics of appreciating the diminutive. Especially in the practice of crafts, the miniaturization of nature motifs has been essential in creating, for example, lacquer wares, as he must have been well aware from his uncle’s work. Kagoshima rendered his interpretative commentary as a picture, partly because language was admittedly not his forte, but more importantly because he considered text to be a black-and-white picture. He also found a useful source in ehon (literally “picture-book”) from the early history of printing in Japan. In particular, Kagoshima’s Diptychs are reminiscent of Nara ehon, a type of illustrated book popular in Japan from the sixteenth century onward, which established the format of juxtaposing an image and a text side by side on a spread to narrate such famous medieval tales as Genji and Ise well before book publishing became ubiquitous thanks to ukiyo-e printing in the mid-eighteenth century. He adapted this tradition to express his pictorial interpretation of American gestural abstraction.

It took some time for Kagoshima to figure out the placement of his mindscape. In 1989–91, the right panel was still in flux as a large monochrome head occupied the picture, showing little indication of the artist’s Rorschach reaction.¹⁹ By 1992, however, Kagoshima finalized his scheme for a conceptualized head with a heart-shaped brain. The motif of the human head, representing both male and female figures of various ethnicity, engaged him from early on. Aside from the series of expressionistic canvases shown at the New Museum, he would frequently fill a letter- or legal-sized paper with rows of tiny, caricatured heads using a ball-point pen or a marker. He would later affectionately call these tiny heads his “monsters,” while giving them the title of One Eye Heads.²⁰ These sheets were included in his WorkSpace installation, spread on the floor and placed over the baseboards. In the Diptychs series, the highly schematized head is symbolic of all of humankind; it is ageless and genderless. It consists of an egg-shaped face and egg-shaped ears, wherein the egg “epitomizes the universe,” as the artist explains today. The single eye looks like a waning moon because it is smiling. The small breathing nose that ensures life is heart-shaped because humans cannot live without love. Situated in the place of a mouth, an ominous a skull (symbolizing death) refers to the killing of animals and plants, our food sources. Most importantly, believing that the heart propels the operations of the brain (mind), he topped the head with a huge heart-shaped headdress as his picture balloon, just like a speech balloon in comics.

***

E’wao Kagoshima believes in the power of painting, which makes “seeing” a crucial issue. As he observes, most people do not see a painting or rather, they cannot see it. More than making individual works—which he has proven his gift for throughout his diverse oeuvre—Kagoshima has sought to organize them in such a way as to entice the viewer to truly “see,” underscoring this ambition in two signature projects: the WorkSpace installation at the New Museum in the 1980s and the Diptychs series in the 1990s. The respective strategies employed for each are predicated upon two contrasting principles: Through a chaotic immersion at the New Museum, he invited the viewer into physical experiences of his works in an awe-and-shock manner. In comparison, a mini exposition of Diptychs compels the viewer toward quiet reflection, wherein the mind may play a central role in concert with the eyes. Neither would have been possible had he stayed in Japan and taken up the life of an artist, in which skilled craft is often prioritized. New York has nurtured him. But the freedom to be an artist is not the sole benefit he has received. Capitalizing on his visual intellect, he has conducted interpoetic dialogues with the art of his new home, learning from and building on the work of his predecessors and contemporaries while injecting elements of the art and culture he brought with him from his motherland. In this sense, Kagoshima is not just a Japanese-born artist in New York, but a diasporic artist who has actively participated in the art of his adopted home, while tapping into his cultural heritage. As such, he will arguably deserve his spot among the growing roster of contributors to an expanding art history of New York.

^NOTES
1 Michael Brenson, “New Museum Given Home in Soho,” New York Times, January 8, 1983, https://www.nytimes.com/1983/01/08/arts/new-museum-given-home-in-soho.html. In this essay, all URLs are last accessed on June 23, 2025.
² For WorkSpace exhibitions, see the New Museum’s website, https://archive.newmuseum.org/series/1539.
³ The artist’s recollections of his life and art, including the New Museum show, are taken from the series of interviews the author conducted with him on March 24 and 31; April 7, 14, and 28; May 7, 9, and 19; June 12; and July 7 and 15, 2025 at the offices of the Center for Art, Research, and Alliance (CARA). Hereafter they are quoted without notes.
⁴Robin Dodds, “E’wao Kagoshima,” in WorkSpace: E’wao Kagoshima, exhibition brochure (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1983), n.p.
⁵ The word is taken from E’wao Kagoshima, letter to Barry Schwabsky (photocopy), November 2, 1994, Greenspoon Gallery archive, New York. See more on this term in the section on his Diptychs series.
⁶ At the university, three metalwork specialties are offered within the crafts department: the oldest section is metal carving (chōkin), established in 1887 when the school’s predecessor, the Tokyo Fine Arts School, first opened; the sections for metal casting (chūkin) and metal forging and hammering (tankin) followed in 1892 and 1895 respectively. See the Tokyo University of the Arts website, https://www.geidai.ac.jp/department/fine_arts/crafts.
⁷ For more on his early works, see Manabu Yahagi’s essay, “From Pop to Fantasy:
E’wao Kagoshima’s Formative Years in Japan.”
⁸ This series is neither dated nor signed but an extant slide in the artist’s archive carries the date of 1981.
⁹ Lynn Gumpert, telephone conversation with the author, April 22, 2015.
¹⁰ Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” ARTnews, December 1952.
¹¹ Dodds, “E’wao Kagoshima,” n.p.
¹² Ibid.
¹³ Ibid.
¹⁴ A photograph that shows a straightforward double-hanging exists in the Lannan Foundation’s E’wao Kagoshima papers, presently maintained in a binder at Ulterior Gallery in New York. Hereafter referred to as “Lannan Binder.”
¹⁵ On the foundation’s website, eleven works are listed without images. See “E’wao Kagoshima,” Lannan Foundation website, https://lannan.org/bios/ewao-kagoshima.
¹⁶ “About Lannan,” Lannan Foundation website, https://lannan.org/about.
¹⁷ Walter H. Waggoner, “J. Patrick Lannan, Ex-Director of I.T.T. and Backer of Arts,” New York Times, September 27, 1983, https://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/27/obituaries/j-patrick-lannan-ex-director-of-itt and-backer-of-arts.html.
¹⁸ This paired characterization is made in his letter to Barry Schwabsky, November 2, 1994 (see fn 5). This was a part of the artist’s attempt at a theoretical excursion in the early 1990s, most likely instigated and led by his wife Sachi, who was his self-appointed publicist, especially for his Diptychs series. Serving as the husband’s translator, she collaborated with the art critic Barry Schwabsky, who apparently offered such theoretical sources as Lacan and Lyotard to compliment Sachi’s eclectic mysticism, and helped her draft such theory-driven statements as “Painting Revolution” and “Painting Manifesto.” These statements along with some source materials were sent to his gallerists (Mitchell Algus and Amy Greenspon, among others). In the aforementioned “Lannan Binder,” a short “Painting Revolution” was included with the thumbnail list of Kagoshima’s Diptychs as part of a form letter dated September 10, 1997. The inclusion of many cartoon-like heads in their correspondences was primarily done by Sashi, who photocopied E’wao’s head drawings in the layout. The use of more than a handful of key Japanese terms certainly indicates the inputs provided by the artist Kagoshima, who today attributes this whole episode in his theorization to his wife. However, it is clear that the artist’s own thinking can be gleaned from the enigmatic statements. The case in point is the pairing of “pure abstraction” and “pure shinshō” to explain the Diptychs series. At first glance, the insertion of 心象 (shinshō) in the margin may seem perfunctory, but the addition evidently derived from Sachi’s inability to find a precise English equivalent of the Japanese word. The translation she gave is “visuality”—literally meaning “of being visual”—which lacks the crucial component of the mental intervention into the creation of another level of visuality—the task he today eloquently articulates in his own words to the author in his interviews. 心象 (shinshō) is not an easy word to translate. All the more so, the inclusion of the Japanese words in this crucial document is a proverbial bread crumb left for later reevaluation. In retrospect, Kagoshima’s strength is his visual intellect and its acuity, rather than the mobilization of postmodern or other theories. For this reason, I have opted to prioritize the artist’s words I gathered in my interviews.
¹⁹“Lannan Binder” includes a few valuable early examples. One is Summer Festival (1990), photocopied and included in letter to friends, 3/18/1991. Two 35mm color slides (Aloha and Sunset Blue, both dated 1991) are attached to a form letter of “help-call,” November 5, 1991.
²⁰ For more on One Eye Heads, see Brandon Eng’s essay on the subject.