Yasue Kodama (児玉靖枝) is a Japanese artist born in Hyogo in 1961. She graduated from the Kyoto City University of Arts with a B.A. in Oil Painting in 1984 and an M.A. in painting in 1986. Kodama's early works consist primary of still life works but she shifted to more abstract works in the 1990s but then turns back towards the representational in the 2000s. She has received various awards throughout her career, such as the 34th Kyoto Fine Arts and Culture Award in 2021, and has participated numerous group exhibition such as VOCA: Vision of Contemporary Art exhibitions and Monet's Legacy at the Yokohama Museum of Art in 2018. Her works are included in various public collections across Japan. She has also taught painting at her alma mater, the Kyoto City University of Arts.
Artistic development
Early works
In an interview for Art Okuru, Kodama explains that when she first started making artwork in the 1980s, she felt caught between the two pervading artistic frameworks of conceptual art and expressionistic works that seemed to “explode from within.” Due to this seemingly polarized environment she decided to simply paint what was in front of her and focused on still life oil paintings.
As a student, she would spend copious amounts of time, three to four months, painting detailed stones and other motifs. It was through this process and her exposure to Georgio Morandi at her professor's suggestion that she became interested in the idea of pictorial space which nudged the trajectory of her work away from realism.
Shift to abstraction
In an interview with Chikako Ikegami in the Winter 1993 edition of Japanese art magazine, Contemporary Artists Review, Kodama relates an episode regarding how she shifted from still life paintings to abstract paintings. On a trip across Europe, she encountered many Morandi paintings for which she had until that point she had felt an affinity towards. But after seeing many Morandi works across various museums across Europe, the works that interested her began to shift towards abstract works, particularly those of Cy Twombly, who she had not encountered, even through art books, until her trip to Europe. She realized what it was about Morandi's works that had attracted her: the pictorial space rather than the still life motifs themselves.
In her process of artistic development, Kodama was heavily influenced by the way that Mark Rothko uses delicate color arrangements to express light in limited pictorial space; the scale and the ease with which Robert Motherwell produces his layered textured works. These were the influenced behind her shift to abstraction which coalesced in her Natura Morta series.
Reemergence of figurative
In the wake of a skiing injury, Kodama was limited to producing charcoal sketches, unable to use the oil paints that she was accustomed to. These monochrome explorations, in combination with her exposure to abstract expressionism, contributed to her desire to enter her works not only through visual perception but physically. As her works became more abstract, the size of her canvases also increased. But as she explored abstraction, she felt a pulled back towards the representational just as she had been pulled towards the abstract when she worked with the representational.
Kodama has continued to live in Kyoto since she was a university student and as such has had many opportunities to see works from the Maruyama Shijo school. She states that her encounter with Bakusen Tsuchida’s work was influential. While her artistic developments had tended towards the abstract, she felt a strong attraction to Tsuchida’s motif of nature and shifted her style once again to the representational but this time in a nature-oriented direction. Although Kodama states in another interview conducted and recorded in the exhibition catalogue of Primary Field II in 2010 at the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama, that her interest in nature does not directly stem from traditional Japanese depictions of seasons, but that her works often try to capture the different places that her eyes fall upon on the walks she often takes in her neighborhood.