The centenary of his birth is the occasion for two exhibitions around Shinkichi Tajiri in Limburg, where the Dutch-American artist of Japanese descent lived and worked for about half his life. But current events give the exhibitions in the Bonnefanten in Maastricht and the Museum Van Bommel van Dam in Venlo extra urgency. The work of Tajiri (1923-2009), much more than just the sculptures that made him famous, was almost always about war, displacement, migration and racism.
The day of his eighteenth birthday, December 7, 1941, sowed the seeds for this. The Japanese attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor turned Tajiri’s life upside down forever. Although Tajiri felt American, he was the son of Japanese immigrants. Together with his parents, he was detained as a possible danger to the US in the stables of a horse racing track in Los Angeles and later in a camp in Arizona. Tajiri was seen as the enemy. Even voluntary service in the US Army, injuries and a series of awards did not change that.
The post-war reception in the US disappointed Tajiri so much that in his twenties he sought refuge in Paris with the help of a scholarship for veterans, where he was taught by Ossip Zadkine, among others. There he also met his later wife Ferdi Jansen (1927-1969), with whom he left for her native Netherlands in 1956. When their Amsterdam home and workplace became too small, they moved to the dilapidated Scheres Castle in Baarlo, North Limburg.
Exhaust pipes
Tajiri’s art was close to movements such as Cobra and pop art, but when he felt that conceptual art was moving too much towards difficult stories, he looked for something that could appeal to a broader audience. These became the buttons, which are perhaps the most famous of all his works.
Grandchildren Tanéa and Shakuru Tajiri curated the exhibition in Bonnefanten. By linking their grandfather’s art to a striking selection of objects from the family archive, they interweave his personal and artistic development with the history of the twentieth century. The last room of the exhibition shows a number of works by Tajiri and his wife, including the designs for the Zen garden that he once created for the Cobra museum in Amstelveen.
Recurring motifs
The exhibition in Venlo tries to bring the atmosphere of Scheres Castle, where Tajir lived from 1962 until his death in 2009, to life in one large room. Four recurring motifs in Tajiri’s oeuvre are central: in addition to the buttons, these are towers, machines and guards. The guards and the towers in particular often caused misunderstandings. Some saw them as a glorification of militarism, while the artist wanted to criticize it. If you look closely at the guards, you will see how often they depict his own war story: there is extra protection or an injury at the knee, the place where he suffered serious injuries in Italy.
What is striking when viewing both exhibitions is the consistent quality of Tajiri’s art. In almost all expressions (sculpture, paintings, graphics, photography, video, computer art) he is a master of medium and material. Tajiri’s broad oeuvre not only testifies to enormous creativity and idiosyncrasy, but also to enormous curiosity and zeal.
Anyone visiting the exhibition in Venlo can combine it with a visit to some of Tajiri’s works in public space. It is a maximum of a fifteen-minute walk from the museum to the Maas Bridge. Since 2007, there have also been four cast-iron guards by Tajiri’s hand on it.
Baarlo is about ten kilometers away. The castle remains largely hidden behind the walls, but visitors can enjoy the many works that the artist left behind in and around the village.
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