Toshiko Okanoue: Between the Layers of Dreams

Text by Mika Kobayashi

Toshiko Okanoue: Between the Layers of Dreams

Text by Mika Kobayashi

This document was originally published in Foam Magazine #15, the images mentioned in the text are

available at the following URL.

http://www.foammagazine.nl/index.php?pageId=9&foto=43

Toshiko Okanoue(b.1928) started making photo-collage while she was studying fashion drawing in

1950.During the next 6 years she created over 100 works and did her solo shows in Tokyo in 1953 and

1956, but she stopped making them after the marriage in 1957. In 1967, she returned her home town in

Kochi and has lived there since then. Her works have been highly acclaimed since the late 1990s and

collected in public institutions such as the The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Tokyo

Metropolitan 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 Photography

and Video from Japan” held at International Center of Photography in New York. She is going to

undertake 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 from

Seikyu-sha in 2005.

Since the late 1990s the photo-collage works of Toshiko Okanoue have been ‘rediscovered’ through

exhibitions 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 History

of 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 surrealist

movement in Japan. Her works had been buried in oblivion for nearly forty years, largely because of the

course her life took. After throwing all her energies into making over 100 photo-collage works in the first

half 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 Dreams
Text 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 learned

dressmaking 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 knew

little 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 a

leading figure of the surrealist movement in Japan and the organizer of Jikken Kobo (Experimental

Workshop), an avant-garde artists’ group. Impressed by the quality of her collage works, he introduced

Okanoue to the works of Max Ernst, whose approach had a decisive influence on her. Takiguchi

organized two solo exhibitions of her works at the Takemiya Gallery in 1953 and 1956. For the invitation

to 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, she

cuts up illustrated magazines to make collages that depict her very dreams. The resulting album is

a 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 a

technique. 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 an

imaginary world. In other words, what Takiguchi discovered in her works and was curating were new

ways of seeing and interpreting the contemporary world that was increasingly saturated by the printed

images in newspapers and magazines.

The world of fantasy in the magazines

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 Toshiko Okanoue: Between the Layers of Dreams
Text 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 Japan

after the Allied occupation of 1945-1952. The 40s and 50s were the heyday of photojournalism and these

magazines carried many articles and photo-essays, reportages as well as full-page advertisements richly

illustrated with photographs. For those who had undergone the poverty and hardship of the war, the

occupation and the postwar rehabilitation in Japan, the affluent world depicted in the advertisements and

the 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 these

figures 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 is

indicated 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 the

doors 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 the

world of her dreams and fantasies. This is noticeable in The Nest of Angels (1952) where a woman flies

through a window to arrive at a dance party being held in an old castle. The irrationality and dreamlike

quality of the scenes is sometimes emphasized by the motifs being arranged in a such a way that they

appear to be floating in mid-air, as in Noon Song (1954), where insects and butterflies fly around the table

on 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), in

which the head of a woman is detached and suspended from a parachute. A probable reason why Okanoue

often removed the heads of women was her experience of using headless mannequins for dressmaking

and the study of fashion design. Their heads are replaced with accessories, plants and animals, turning the

women into imaginary creatures. In Visit in the Night (1951), in which a mysterious woman floats with

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umbrellas against a foggy cityscape, her head supplanted by a fan. Replacing their heads with animals

and insects makes the women seem even more enigmatic and extraordinary. In Incubation (1955), the

face of a woman resting on a cushion is replaced by a butterfly and she holds the eggs on her lap. What

sort of creature is she going to hatch? In Fantasy (1953), a woman with the head of a horse is lying on the

floor of a gorgeous drawing room surrounded by three horses. In the same vein, in The Night of the

Dance Party (1954), the head of a woman in a ballroom is replaced by hands in gloves that appear to be a

creature such as a sea anemone. These irrational and absurd scenes might be read as her own fantasy with

a little twist of sexual desire. It is quite interesting to see that the image of fashion models, created as the

idealized commodities of the postwar consumer society were transformed into strange creatures charged

with highly wrought, complex emotions. The women even appear to take on and express the power which

has been concealed inside them. In Noblewoman (1954), an armless woman in long dress is standing in

front of a door. Her profile is almost covered by a big screw and she is about to break through the door

with the screw instead of opening it. Likewise, in A Trait Angel (1954), a woman appears with two hands

holding guns behind her wings. A man on the right seems to have been blown away by the woman’s shot.

Okanoue’s methods of creating her collage works were based on the exploration of scenes and things that

she could have known in postwar Japan only through magazines. The scenes she created in her works

show us her admiration for these things and scenes from the western world but also her impulsive desire

for something she could not have experienced in her own life. Between the complex layers of motifs we

can imagine what her desires may have been, not all that different from our own.

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