長岡 美和子 Miwako Nagaoka

1945- / F / Chiba

Miwako Nagaoka is a voracious reader and a lover of literature. She is also a sho artist, a painter and a practitioner of iai, the ancient Japanese martial art of drawing a sword quickly in response to a sudden attack. The “Re-composed Character” is an artistic technique developed by Nagaoka in which she takes a single character that resonates in her subconscious mind from a page of her favorite novel, uses a drybrush to draw this character as a work of sho, and decomposes the support to create an image representative of the character.The character in question, which is extracted as a representative of the group of characters comprising the text on a given page of the novel, takes on a three- dimensional sense of dynamism through the use of a drybrush for representation as opposed to the usual two- dimensional expression produced by a brush soaked in sumi ink. Furthermore, decomposing the entire work including its support makes it possible to visually express the atmosphere of the scene in addition to reproducing the ideographic aspect of the character. For decomposition, the support is divided into sections almost as if it had been cut using the art of iai.