Toshiko Okanoue: Between the Layers of DreamsText by Mika Kobayashi

This document was originally published in Foam Magazine #15, the images mentioned in the text areavailable at the following URL.

http://www.foammagazine.nl/index.php?pageId=9&foto=43Toshiko Okanoue(b.1928) started making photo-collage while she was studying fashion drawing in1950.During the next 6 years she created over 100 works and did her solo shows in Tokyo in 1953 and1956, but she stopped making them after the marriage in 1957. In 1967, she returned her home town inKochi and has lived there since then. Her works have been highly acclaimed since the late 1990s andcollected in public institutions such as the The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, TokyoMetropolitan Museum of Photography and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.Both of her monograph,”Drop of Dreams’(2002 and portfolio, “The Miracle of Silence”(2007) were published from Nazraeli press. Okanoue is represented by The Third Gallery Aya in Osaka, Japan.Mika Kobayashi(b.1973) is a photo critic and has been writing and translating the books on photography.Recently she has been involved with the organizing of the exhibition, “Heavy Light: Recent Photographyand Video from Japan” held at International Center of Photography in New York. She is going toundertake the research of Japanese photography collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.One of her book is “Shashin wo Yomu Shiten(The Viewpoints of Reading Photographs)”, published fromSeikyu-sha in 2005.Since the late 1990s the photo-collage works of Toshiko Okanoue have been ‘rediscovered’ throughexhibitions and in publications. Her monograph

Drop of Dreams: Toshiko Okanoue 1950-1956

was published in 2002 by Nazlaeri Press and some of her works were included in an exhibition,

The Historyof Japanese Photography

, held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and its accompanying catalogue.Her works have gained recognition for their importance to postwar photography and the surrealistmovement in Japan. Her works had been buried in oblivion for nearly forty years, largely because of thecourse her life took. After throwing all her energies into making over 100 photo-collage works in the firsthalf of 1950s, she married the painter Kazutomo Fujino and ceased working as a photographer. Most of her works were created in her mid-twenties, and they clearly reflect the sensitivity of the age. Many

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Toshiko Okanoue: Between the Layers of DreamsText by Mika Kobayashi

women in Japan in those days were obliged to quit their careers after the marriage.

‘A contemporary version of Alice in Wonderland’

Toshiko Okanoue was born in 1928 and grew up during the War in the Pacific. After the war she learneddressmaking at a vocational school and then studied design at Bunka Gakuin, a small art school in Tokyo.Under the influence of one of her classmates she began to make collages, though at the time she knewlittle about the history of art, including even the surrealist movement from which the idea of photo-collage emerged. She regarded her technique of making pictures as a form of ‘hari-e’ (‘hari’ means pasting and ‘e’ means a picture in Japanese), a traditional Japanese technique of making pictures by pasting small pieces of colored paper on pasteboard.In 1952 after meeting the poet Shuzo Takiguchi her vision broadened dramatically. Takiguchi was aleading figure of the surrealist movement in Japan and the organizer of Jikken Kobo (ExperimentalWorkshop), an avant-garde artists’ group. Impressed by the quality of her collage works, he introducedOkanoue to the works of Max Ernst, whose approach had a decisive influence on her. Takiguchiorganized two solo exhibitions of her works at the Takemiya Gallery in 1953 and 1956. For the invitationto the

Okanoue Toshiko Collage Exhibition

in 1953, Takiguchi wrote:

Happy New year! Miss Okanoue is not a painter, she is a young lady. Working by herself, shecuts up illustrated magazines to make collages that depict her very dreams. The resulting album isa contemporary version of Alice in Wonderland. Please come and see for yourself.

As can be seen from his introducing her as a young lady instead of as an artist Okanoue’s making of collage works was regarded as an outcome of involvement with her own fantasy rather than a skill or atechnique. And by describing the body of her work as

a contemporary version of Alice in Wonderland,

Takiguchi seems to have intended to portray her as a little girl who had wandered by accident into animaginary world. In other words, what Takiguchi discovered in her works and was curating were newways of seeing and interpreting the contemporary world that was increasingly saturated by the printedimages in newspapers and magazines.

The world of fantasy in the magazines

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Toshiko Okanoue: Between the Layers of DreamsText by Mika Kobayashi

Okanoue found the motifs for her works mainly in U. S. magazines such as

Life

and

Vogue

which she bought from secondhand bookshops in Tokyo. Many of these magazines had been left behind in Japanafter the Allied occupation of 1945-1952. The 40s and 50s were the heyday of photojournalism and thesemagazines carried many articles and photo-essays, reportages as well as full-page advertisements richlyillustrated with photographs. For those who had undergone the poverty and hardship of the war, theoccupation and the postwar rehabilitation in Japan, the affluent world depicted in the advertisements andthe fashion plates seemed to be a world of fantasy, the very opposite to life in postwar Japan.Since Okanoue was at that time studying to become a fashion designer, the pictures in

Vogue

and other fashion magazines must have been fascinating and very attractive to her. The motifs that appear in her works are of fashion models wearing elegant dresses and lingerie. In these pictures the contours of the models’ bodies and dresses were emphasized by the effect of artificial lighting. By cutting out thesefigures carefully with scissors and pasting them onto pages that depict different scenes Okanoue was placing the models onto stage-like backgrounds and making them act as the characters in the stories, as isindicated by titles like

Ophelia

(1955) and

Leda in the Sea

(1952).The background scenes of these figures are seas, mountains, cities, streets, skyscrapers, interiors of mansions and churches. Sometimes the background is combined with other scenes, inlayed through thedoors and windows of the buildings, thus adding further dimensions. For Okanoue, flipping through the pages of American magazines and pasting the cutout pictures onto paper was a way of stepping into theworld of her dreams and fantasies. This is noticeable in

The Nest of Angels

(1952) where a woman fliesthrough a window to arrive at a dance party being held in an old castle. The irrationality and dreamlikequality of the scenes is sometimes emphasized by the motifs being arranged in a such a way that theyappear to be floating in mid-air, as in

Noon Song

(1954), where insects and butterflies fly around the tableon which a woman’s leg of is protruding from a dress.

Headless Women

The fantasy worlds she created contain extraordinary aspects, enigmatic and sometimes disturbing, particularly the removal of the women’s heads. One striking example is

The Miracle of Silence

(1952), inwhich the head of a woman is detached and suspended from a parachute. A probable reason why Okanoueoften removed the heads of women was her experience of using headless mannequins for dressmakingand the study of fashion design. Their heads are replaced with accessories, plants and animals, turning thewomen into imaginary creatures. In

Visit in the Night

(1951), in which a mysterious woman floats with

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