Seiichi Niikuni
Encyclopedia
was a Japanese poet
and painter
. He was one of the foremost pioneers of the international avant-garde concrete poetry
movement, creating works of calligraphic, visual and aural poetry. He is recognized as one of the most important poets of recent times in Japanese and German textbooks.
It is said that during his latter years, he started to prefer the old kanji orthography
form of his name, .
, Japan
. He entered the Sendai Technical School (now Sendai Technical High School) and studied architecture. After graduating from high school, he entered the Tohoku Gakuin University
to study English literature and graduated from there in 1951.
In 1952 he began his career as a poet in earnest by joining a circle that published the poetry magazine Hyōga . In the fifth issue of this magazine, he published his first poem called Urei wo Paipu ni Tsumete .
In 1960 he left Hyōga and joined Bungei Tōhoku . The motifs and audiovisual presentation that he would later become famous for, could already be seen in the works he submitted to Bungei Tōhoku. At the same time he was also a contributor for the Kahoku Shimpo ( Kahoku Shinpō) newspaper. He was already titled a poet and a painter at that time.
art department. He also married painter
Kiyo Miura ( Miura Kiyo) the same year.
In 1963 he published the poetry anthology Zero-on . A limited run of 300 copies, it was but an ordinary and simplistic book of no more than 48 pages. The title Zero-on was picked by his wife Kiyo from a list of several candidate names.
study group held in Yukinobu Kagiya's house, and met Yasuo Fujitomi while there. On June 4, he established an association called the Association of Study of Arts or ASA ( Geijutsu Kenkyū Kyōkai) with Fujitomi with the objective of exploring and experimenting with concrete poetry. They published a namesake magazine ASA and in it introduced both Japanese and foreign concrete poetry, and also translated poems by Haroldo de Campos
into Japanese. Fujitomi would also introduce the Brazilian concrete poetry group Noigandres' (es) member Luis Carlos Vinholes to Niikuni, and Vinholes in turn introduced the French poet Pierre Garnier (fr) to Niikuni. Niikuni would later send Zero-on to Garnier.
In 1966, Niikuni and Garnier published a collective poetry work together called Nichifutsu Shishū in France. Furthermore, in 1969 he was asked to and displayed his works at the German Visual Poetry exhibition at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen
. Requests from abroad to display his works kept increasing, and Niikuni gradually started to set his sights on foreign exhibitions. In 1974, he held a one-man exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London
.
at the age of 52 (kazoedoshi). The publication of ASA also came to an end, with the seventh issue published in 1974 remaining as the last issue.
could be seen in these works, and Niikuni also admitted himself that Hagiwara was his starting point. Niikuni also wrote that he paid attention to the works of Shirō Murano and Junzaburō Nishiwaki. In addition, he was fascinated by surrealism
, new objectivity
and existentialism
among others.
, old values were uprooted and Niikuni started to question the meaning of words and metaphors in poems. In particular, he read Junzaburō Nishiwaki's Chō-genjitsu-shugi-shiron and found the idea of poems being metaphorical limiting and empty. Thereafter, he began to thoroughly strip words to their barest form, and to reappropriate words' meaning into poetry that was constructed out of shapes and sounds. However, he was not able to immediately move from the modernism of Nishiwaki and Hagiwara, but took a number of years of hesitation to be able to gradually move to visual and aural poetry. With this transition, Niikuni did not completely reject metaphors, but included metaphor-like modernism
and on top of it pursued poetry's essence in analogies
. Furthermore, as was already visible from his works at the time of Hyōga, Niikuni was particular about carnal expression such as using sexual kanji
like (danjo, men and women) and (kuchibiru, lips).
The calligraphic poetry in the first half was mainly constructed of kanji of varying sizes, hiragana
and katakana
characters, that were placed on pages with special emphasis on the spatiality that they created, being close to an experiment in visual poetry. The aural poetry in the second half was, as the name implies, poetry for listening, exemplified by a public performance of reading aloud of the poems in December 1963. This experiment was witnessed by the composer
Yasunao Tone
among others.
The works in Zero-on, especially those of calligraphic poetry, that were created out of spatially emphasized characters, are thought to be the influenced by the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé
's Un coup de dés
. Influences by John Cage
and twelve-tone music
are also noted.
Vinholes advocated the importance of audio to Niikuni, after which Niikuni started to actively experiment with aural poetry. At the same time, reel to reel
audio technology and phototypesetting
were developed, and are seen to have had an effect on the style of expression in Zero-on and later works.
. When Pierre Garnier saw Zero-on, he was amazed at how similar works they strove for and produced although the languages they spoke differed so much. This was the beginning of their friendship. Later, Garnier and Niikuni collaborated on Nichifutsu Shishū , producing works such as the Micropoem. Niikuni was noted abroad as an example of a writer that relied on ideographs (kanji), and requests to display his works kept coming in. Niikuni progressed to methods like graphic design and emphasizing communication after Zero-on, but he would not budge from expressing through kanji characters.
In ASA Niikuni presented his most notable works, such as Kawa mata wa Shū and Ame . He would place characters as if they were a surface, bringing forth the visuality of both the complete surface and individual characters at the same time. In Yami , the character for sound would be seen breaking away from the character of darkness . Niikuni also started using the Gothic typeface instead of Minchō. It is thought that this kind of breaking kanji into its parts and varying the shape of characters was done with Western audiences in mind.
Also from around this time, his works started incorporating explanatory notes in English about the meaning of the kanji characters used. For example Uso in 1966 explained that "(口)=mouth (虚)=void (嘘)=lie". This was in response to requests from abroad.
Niikuni himself disliked the fact that these visual poems were regarded as being borderline art, and also denied that they were based on photography. However, in actuality his works were often talked about from the point of view of there being a relation between the pictures and poems, and it was often opined that it cannot be avoided that poems that utilized spatiality approach the realm of art.
in Osaka
, along with the publishing of a compilation of Niikuni's works, garnering the larger public's attention once again. The aesthetic of using characters as material was noted to be related to ASCII art
in a fundamental way.
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
and painter
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
. He was one of the foremost pioneers of the international avant-garde concrete poetry
Concrete poetry
Concrete poetry or shape poetry is poetry in which the typographical arrangement of words is as important in conveying the intended effect as the conventional elements of the poem, such as meaning of words, rhythm, rhyme and so on....
movement, creating works of calligraphic, visual and aural poetry. He is recognized as one of the most important poets of recent times in Japanese and German textbooks.
It is said that during his latter years, he started to prefer the old kanji orthography
Kyujitai
Kyūjitai, literally "old character forms" , are the traditional forms of kanji, Chinese written characters used in Japanese. Their simplified counterparts are shinjitai, "new character forms". Some of the simplified characters arose centuries ago and were in everyday use in both China and Japan,...
form of his name, .
Life
Time in Sendai
Niikuni was born on December 7, 1925 in Sendai, Miyagi PrefectureMiyagi Prefecture
is a prefecture of Japan in the Tōhoku Region on Honshu island. The capital is Sendai.- History :Miyagi Prefecture was formerly part of the province of Mutsu. Mutsu Province, on northern Honshu, was one of the last provinces to be formed as land was taken from the indigenous Emishi, and became the...
, Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
. He entered the Sendai Technical School (now Sendai Technical High School) and studied architecture. After graduating from high school, he entered the Tohoku Gakuin University
Tohoku Gakuin University
is a private university in Sendai, Japan. It was founded under a Christian background is a private university in Sendai, Japan. It was founded under a Christian background is a private university in Sendai, Japan. It was founded under a Christian background (specifically the German Reformed...
to study English literature and graduated from there in 1951.
In 1952 he began his career as a poet in earnest by joining a circle that published the poetry magazine Hyōga . In the fifth issue of this magazine, he published his first poem called Urei wo Paipu ni Tsumete .
In 1960 he left Hyōga and joined Bungei Tōhoku . The motifs and audiovisual presentation that he would later become famous for, could already be seen in the works he submitted to Bungei Tōhoku. At the same time he was also a contributor for the Kahoku Shimpo ( Kahoku Shinpō) newspaper. He was already titled a poet and a painter at that time.
Moving to Tokyo and Zero-on
In 1962, Niikuni would publish a magazine called Tama with two other poets he met while contributing to Bungei Tōhoku. The same year, in the fall he remarked that "people in Sendai just don't understand" and decided to move to Tokyo. He worked for a while at a design studio, and moved on to work for an NHKNHK
NHK is Japan's national public broadcasting organization. NHK, which has always identified itself to its audiences by the English pronunciation of its initials, is a publicly owned corporation funded by viewers' payments of a television license fee....
art department. He also married painter
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
Kiyo Miura ( Miura Kiyo) the same year.
In 1963 he published the poetry anthology Zero-on . A limited run of 300 copies, it was but an ordinary and simplistic book of no more than 48 pages. The title Zero-on was picked by his wife Kiyo from a list of several candidate names.
Founding of ASA and international attention
In 1964, Niikuni participated in the E. E. CummingsE. E. Cummings
Edward Estlin Cummings , popularly known as E. E. Cummings, with the abbreviated form of his name often written by others in lowercase letters as e.e. cummings , was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright...
study group held in Yukinobu Kagiya's house, and met Yasuo Fujitomi while there. On June 4, he established an association called the Association of Study of Arts or ASA ( Geijutsu Kenkyū Kyōkai) with Fujitomi with the objective of exploring and experimenting with concrete poetry. They published a namesake magazine ASA and in it introduced both Japanese and foreign concrete poetry, and also translated poems by Haroldo de Campos
Haroldo de Campos
Haroldo de Campos was a Brazilian poet, critic, and translator. He did his secondary education at the College of St. Benedict, where he learned the first foreign language, like Latin, English, Spanish and French...
into Japanese. Fujitomi would also introduce the Brazilian concrete poetry group Noigandres' (es) member Luis Carlos Vinholes to Niikuni, and Vinholes in turn introduced the French poet Pierre Garnier (fr) to Niikuni. Niikuni would later send Zero-on to Garnier.
In 1966, Niikuni and Garnier published a collective poetry work together called Nichifutsu Shishū in France. Furthermore, in 1969 he was asked to and displayed his works at the German Visual Poetry exhibition at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen
The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is the art collection of the German Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia, located in Düsseldorf. United by this institution are three different exhibition venues: the K20 at Grabbeplatz, the K21 in the Ständehaus and the Schmela Haus...
. Requests from abroad to display his works kept increasing, and Niikuni gradually started to set his sights on foreign exhibitions. In 1974, he held a one-man exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
.
Later years
From an early age, Niikuni had chest ailments and was constantly worried about his health. He was reportedly very happy to reach the age of 50, but would succumb to a sudden illness only two years later on August 23, 1977. He died in his home in TokyoTokyo
, ; officially , is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan. Tokyo is the capital of Japan, the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the largest metropolitan area of Japan. It is the seat of the Japanese government and the Imperial Palace, and the home of the Japanese Imperial Family...
at the age of 52 (kazoedoshi). The publication of ASA also came to an end, with the seventh issue published in 1974 remaining as the last issue.
Modernism in the beginning
Niikuni started to write poetry on the side while attending school, and until he was in his twenties he would write not experimental poetry but lyrical poetry. The effect of Sakutarō HagiwaraSakutarō Hagiwara
was a Japanese writer of free-style verse, active in the Taishō and early Shōwa periods of Japan. He liberated Japanese free verse from the grip of traditional rules, and he is considered the “father of modern colloquial poetry in Japan”...
could be seen in these works, and Niikuni also admitted himself that Hagiwara was his starting point. Niikuni also wrote that he paid attention to the works of Shirō Murano and Junzaburō Nishiwaki. In addition, he was fascinated by surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
, new objectivity
New Objectivity
The New Objectivity is a term used to characterize the attitude of public life in Weimar Germany as well as the art, literature, music, and architecture created to adapt to it...
and existentialism
Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
among others.
From metaphors to analogies
As Japan was forced to face the loss in the second World WarWorld War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, old values were uprooted and Niikuni started to question the meaning of words and metaphors in poems. In particular, he read Junzaburō Nishiwaki's Chō-genjitsu-shugi-shiron and found the idea of poems being metaphorical limiting and empty. Thereafter, he began to thoroughly strip words to their barest form, and to reappropriate words' meaning into poetry that was constructed out of shapes and sounds. However, he was not able to immediately move from the modernism of Nishiwaki and Hagiwara, but took a number of years of hesitation to be able to gradually move to visual and aural poetry. With this transition, Niikuni did not completely reject metaphors, but included metaphor-like modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
and on top of it pursued poetry's essence in analogies
Analogy
Analogy is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject to another particular subject , and a linguistic expression corresponding to such a process...
. Furthermore, as was already visible from his works at the time of Hyōga, Niikuni was particular about carnal expression such as using sexual kanji
Kanji
Kanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters hanzi that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana , katakana , Indo Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet...
like (danjo, men and women) and (kuchibiru, lips).
Zero-on
Niikuni would first present the concept of visual and aural poetry in 1963 in Zero-on . The work was divided into two parts, the first half consisting of calligraphic poetry and second half being aural poetry. A note calling readers to read the poems aloud accompanied the first half.The calligraphic poetry in the first half was mainly constructed of kanji of varying sizes, hiragana
Hiragana
is a Japanese syllabary, one basic component of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana, kanji, and the Latin alphabet . Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems, in which each character represents one mora...
and katakana
Katakana
is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji, and in some cases the Latin alphabet . The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana scripts are derived from components of more complex kanji. Each kana represents one mora...
characters, that were placed on pages with special emphasis on the spatiality that they created, being close to an experiment in visual poetry. The aural poetry in the second half was, as the name implies, poetry for listening, exemplified by a public performance of reading aloud of the poems in December 1963. This experiment was witnessed by the composer
Composer
A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...
Yasunao Tone
Yasunao Tone
Yasunao Tone is a Japanese artist who has worked with many different types of media throughout his career. He was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1935, and he graduated from Chiba Japanese National University in 1957, majoring in Japanese literature. He became active in the Fluxus movement in the 1960s and...
among others.
The works in Zero-on, especially those of calligraphic poetry, that were created out of spatially emphasized characters, are thought to be the influenced by the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
's Un coup de dés
Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard (Mallarmé)
Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard is a poem by the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé...
. Influences by John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
and twelve-tone music
Twelve-tone technique
Twelve-tone technique is a method of musical composition devised by Arnold Schoenberg...
are also noted.
Vinholes advocated the importance of audio to Niikuni, after which Niikuni started to actively experiment with aural poetry. At the same time, reel to reel
Reel-to-reel audio tape recording
Reel-to-reel, open reel tape recording is the form of magnetic tape audio recording in which the recording medium is held on a reel, rather than being securely contained within a cassette....
audio technology and phototypesetting
Phototypesetting
Phototypesetting was a method of setting type, rendered obsolete with the popularity of the personal computer and desktop publishing software, that uses a photographic process to generate columns of type on a scroll of photographic paper...
were developed, and are seen to have had an effect on the style of expression in Zero-on and later works.
ASA and going international
Although at the time of Zero-on Niikuni was not yet aware of the international avant-garde poetry movement, he arrived at the same methodology as the concrete poetry movement in countries that used the alphabetAlphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...
. When Pierre Garnier saw Zero-on, he was amazed at how similar works they strove for and produced although the languages they spoke differed so much. This was the beginning of their friendship. Later, Garnier and Niikuni collaborated on Nichifutsu Shishū , producing works such as the Micropoem. Niikuni was noted abroad as an example of a writer that relied on ideographs (kanji), and requests to display his works kept coming in. Niikuni progressed to methods like graphic design and emphasizing communication after Zero-on, but he would not budge from expressing through kanji characters.
In ASA Niikuni presented his most notable works, such as Kawa mata wa Shū and Ame . He would place characters as if they were a surface, bringing forth the visuality of both the complete surface and individual characters at the same time. In Yami , the character for sound would be seen breaking away from the character of darkness . Niikuni also started using the Gothic typeface instead of Minchō. It is thought that this kind of breaking kanji into its parts and varying the shape of characters was done with Western audiences in mind.
Also from around this time, his works started incorporating explanatory notes in English about the meaning of the kanji characters used. For example Uso in 1966 explained that "(口)=mouth (虚)=void (嘘)=lie". This was in response to requests from abroad.
Niikuni himself disliked the fact that these visual poems were regarded as being borderline art, and also denied that they were based on photography. However, in actuality his works were often talked about from the point of view of there being a relation between the pictures and poems, and it was often opined that it cannot be avoided that poems that utilized spatiality approach the realm of art.
Reception
Niikuni rejected the mixing of poetry and other fields of expression, and insisted on expressing himself only through words. However in the 1970s, the concrete poetry movement started adding elements of visual arts, moving away from purely word-based concretism and becoming closer to visual poetry. After the sudden passing away of Niikuni, the visual and concrete poetry movements in Japan would come to an end and Niikuni's works were soon forgotten. Niikuni's works gathered some interest in the fields of design and arts, but they never got recognition as works of poetry. However, 31 years after Niikuni's death, in 2008, a retrospective exhibition was held at the National Museum of ArtNational Museum of Art, Osaka
The is a subterranean Japanese art museum located on the island of Nakanoshima, located between the Dōjima River and the Tosabori River, about 5 minutes west of Higobashi Station in central Osaka....
in Osaka
Osaka
is a city in the Kansai region of Japan's main island of Honshu, a designated city under the Local Autonomy Law, the capital city of Osaka Prefecture and also the biggest part of Keihanshin area, which is represented by three major cities of Japan, Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe...
, along with the publishing of a compilation of Niikuni's works, garnering the larger public's attention once again. The aesthetic of using characters as material was noted to be related to ASCII art
ASCII art
ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters...
in a fundamental way.
Poetry anthologies and writings
- Zero-on (1963, Shōshinsha)
- This was the only poetry anthology released while Niikuni was still alive.
- Nichifutsu Shishū (1966, published by André Silvaire)
- Collaborative work with Pierre Garnier.
- Niikuni Seiichi Shishū (1979)
- A compilation published by Yasuo Fujitomi, Hiroo Uemura and Shōji Yoshizawa.
- Niikuni Seiichi works 1952-1977 (2008, Shichōsha)
- In addition to including the entirety of Zero-on, this compilation also includes aural poetry.
Major works
- Kan (1965)
- Kawa mata wa Shū (1966)
- Yami (1966)
- Ame (1966)
- Hansen (1970)
- Sawaru (1972)
Critique and essays
- Kūkan Shugi Tōkyō Sengensho in the 3rd issue of ASA
- Metafā no Koto in the 29th issue of Mugen (August 1972)
EP records
- Kūkan Shugi no Onseishi released by ColumbiaColumbia Music Entertainmentis a Japanese record label founded in 1910 as . It affiliated itself with the Columbia Graphophone Company of the United Kingdom and adopted the standard UK Columbia trademarks in 1931. The company changed its name to Nippon Columbia Co., Ltd. in 1946. It used the Nippon Columbia name until...
in 1971- This was an EP recordExtended playAn EP is a musical recording which contains more music than a single, but is too short to qualify as a full album or LP. The term EP originally referred only to specific types of vinyl records other than 78 rpm standard play records and LP records, but it is now applied to mid-length Compact...
of aural poetry. Pierre Garnier's wife Ilse also joined in the making of the record. In 2000, Chabashira Records re-released it in CD format.
- This was an EP record
- Jinruigaku (Pierre Garnier)
- Kuchibiru to Shitto (Seiichi Niikuni)
See also
- Yasuo Fujitomi