is a Japanese artist who has worked in 'reportage' and surrealist styles. Nakamura attended Nihon University and was involved in many artist groups and social movements such as the Zen’ei Bijutsu-kai (Avant-garde Art Society) and the Seinen Bijustuka Rengō. He is often associated with Reportage Painting, the movement that sought to report on the social issues that arose out of the postwar context by engaging first-hand with the local peoples and their struggles. His Suganaga No. 4 of 1955 exemplifies the concern and style of Reportage that is considered a major As postwar reconstruction of Japan progressed, Nakamura's interest in Reportage evolved into an interrogation of the artist's role in "viewing" the fundamentals of the political and social realms. Into the 1960s, in collaboration with Kōichi Tateishi, Nakamura devised the concept of Kankō geijutsu (sightseeing art) and, as an extension, he individually developed a painting style centering around trains and female students in uniform situated in an eerie surrealistic dream-like world. Among other influences, he was inspired by Sergei Einstein's montage theory and Akira Kurosawa's films which contributed to his signature distortion of perspective that he developed through his career.
Early life
Nakamura didn't begin painting until 1953. At the age of nineteen, he left his hometown of Hamamatsu, Shizuoka and moved to Tabata, Tokyo, where he enrolled in the Asagaya School of Art and Design. After a few months, Nakamura transferred schools to Nihon University to study in the Art Department where he was introduced to the history of the Russian Revolution and the thinking of Karl Marx by fellow students. He subsequently joined the Zengakuren (the All-Japan Federation of Students’ Self-Governing Associations) and attended with protests with other activists. As part of his activism, Nakamura also organized a student art group which recruited members from various university art departments. In a similar gesture toward collectivization in art, he also became involved in a painting “circle” of workers at the National Railways facility in Shinagawa. Going once a week to teach basic painting skills, in return he witness the lives of the workers and saw parts of the railway facilities that were not open to the public. These experiences fed into his first works within what is called the Reportage movement.
Reportage and activism
Developed in the wake of the war and American reconstruction in Japan during this time, a foundational aspect of what has been called Reportage painting was going to a site to research and observe the social struggles occurring there in order to depict them. Socialist and anti-imperialist in spirit, many of Nakamura's early works of Reportage art, like "Sunagawa No.5" (1955) “Coal Storage” (1955) critiqued the U.S. military presence in Japan. Nakamura had attended the Diego Rivera exhibition at the Tokyo National Museum in 1955, whose influence may be seen in the depiction of workers in these earlier works.
"Sunagawa No.5", perhaps Nakamura's most famous painting, portrays a protest during the Sunagawa Struggle in response to the planned expansion of Tachikawa Airfield. The painting is a two-point perspective scene showing the clashing between Japanese authorities and a coalition of workers, women, buddhist monks and other protestors. The Japanese authorities, imposing and emotionless, stream rightward from the left-most vanishing point where they confront the protesters at the center of the composition. Streaming leftward from the right-most vanishing point, the protesters are rendered in contrast to the authorities as expressive and determined. Nakamura witnessed this struggle first-hand as a protestor and twenty three-year-old student of Nihon University. The title refers to the site of the protest during the Sunagawa Struggle that Nakamura experienced, with No. 5 being short for 5-chome (the fifth block) of Sunagawa. Conscious of reportage painting's time-sensitivity in its endeavor to mobilize and educate members of the Japanese public, Nakamura completed the painting a few months after returning from the protest. The painting has become known as an exemplary work of the Reportage art despite Nakamura's shift in painting style shortly after completing this work.