haiku tsurezure

haiku tsurezure - #33
Haiku seen by contemporary visual artists

Yuzo Ono

From October to November 2023, I participated in the art exhibition "SPLASH! The Haiku Show" held at White Conduit Projects Gallery in London as a haiku author and workshop lecturer. This art exhibition had a structure in which contemporary visual artists from Japan and the UK created artworks under the theme of haiku, and on top of that, several British poets and I created haiku responding to the artworks, and those haiku were played as audio at the venue.

Installation view from outside White Conduit Projects Gallery, LondonInstallation view from outside White Conduit Projects Gallery, London

After the exhibition, I asked several questions about haiku to the four non-Japanese artists who participated in it, i.e. Olivia Bax, Marisa Culatto, Abi Freckleton, and Lisa Milroy. (I didn't include two Japanese artists of the exhibition in this questionnaire because I thought they probably already knew a lot about haiku.)
The questions and answers are below in blue letters.

Questions

  1. What does haiku look like from the perspective of an artist like you?
  2. How did haiku inspire your art?
  3. Do you think there are some possibilities for collaboration with haiku in your future works?
  4. Are you interested in starting to write haiku?

Olivia Bax

  1. Enjoying Haiku is like recognising when a sculpture is complete; it can be no other way.
    Editing is one of the hardest jobs; Haiku’s restrictions are liberating.
  2. Sculpture structure.
    Colour to describe form.
    Sardonic humour.
  3. No one ever responded to my work in poetry before the exhibition at White Conduit Projects. That experience altered how I experience my own sculptures. I would absolutely enjoy a future collaboration.
  4. I am not promising anything readable but I have been enjoying Basho’s book of Haiku. Perhaps I’ll land on three lines one day.

Marisa Culatto

  1. I am a visual artist from the West, so I approach the idea of visual Haiku in a very literal, respectful way. To me, a Haiku, whether written or visual, follows, as far as possible, the same rules.
  2. In 2019 I embarked in a year long project to do visual Haiku using photography and a lot of digital editing. These follow the written Haiku rules including the three lines – or verses – and a seasonal reference. To reference the seasons in an automatic way, I decided to photograph the same area in UK through the seasons, so there are Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter Haiku, and the whole series comprises 73 works.
  3. Yes. Participating in the SPLASH! Exhibition has opened up my concept of what a visual Haiku can be, taking on a more abstract idea of a concentrated poetical image.
  4. Never say never.

Abi Freckleton

  1. The haiku has a way of very simply creating connections between things, or describing metaphors in a subtle and unique way - I think this is what I am often trying to do in my sculptures also.
  2. I would say that I have been writing haiku without knowing it for some time, the words I use to describe and title my works are often taken from poems I have written, which sometimes - if only quite loosely, follow the structure of haiku.
  3. I very much enjoyed the haiku poems written in response to my artworks for the exhibition at White Conduit Projects - sometimes they seemed to express exactly some of the thoughts and ideas in the work, sometimes they were a brand new interpretation. I like the idea of moving between sculpture and text and back again and think this could be something to explore in the future - perhaps with other writers and artists, to make collaborative works that respond in both directions and across several consecutive steps.
  4. Yes, I would like to learn more about the rules of haiku and read some historical and contemporary haiku to inform my own writing.

Lisa Milroy

  1. In view of the compositional structure of my paintings (the grid, the scatter, lines and groups), I love the formal appearance of haiku - three lines, with 5 syllables in the first line, 7 in the second and 5 in the third.
  2. the beautiful economy of form allied to feeling and conceptual complexity
    the potent visual imagery
    the contrast of oppositional force
    the quality of playfulness, with elements of surprise
    the interplay of the physical and metaphysical
    the lightness of touch, skilfulness
    the intense observation of the physical world, nature and everyday objects
    space, timing, rhythm and flow
    things said through not being said
  3. I would love to collaborate with a haiku poet and create a visual response to their haiku in painting.
  4. No. My medium is paint, not words.

These are the answers given by the four artists, and I was impressed by how accurately they captured the essence of haiku. Of course, their artistic intuition may be what makes this possible, but that doesn't seem to be the only factor. I believe there are three reasons behind this.

The first point is that they view haiku through the language of English. This is because when I look at the world of English-written haiku, I feel that by looking at it through the prism of English, you can purely capture its essence. Things such as the 5-7-5 rhythm that is deeply inherent in Japanese prosody, or the seasonal words that are connected to Japanese history and culture, serve as “tinted glasses” when viewing haiku in Japanese. Simply put, the presence of the 575 rhythm and seasonal words often makes haiku seem “old-fashioned and rigid.” However, through the medium of English, those coloured glasses are removed. What emerges here is the aspect of haiku as an extremely modern and experimental device. For example, I think many characteristics of haiku listed by Lisa Milroy clearly show the experimental potential of haiku.

The second point is that they are working in an area called contemporary art. This is because I sometimes feel that the appearance of contemporary artworks is extremely similar to that of haiku. Contemporary art has an attitude of placing more emphasis on the concept or the way of thinking than on the technique of the works, and this eventually leads to the simplicity of the works' appearance. Needless to say, this simplicity may strongly remind you of the appearance of haiku. In addition, contemporary art has another attitude of emphasising its involvement in social issues, which is in some ways similar to the attitude of haiku (but I do not mean every haiku is like this), which always tries to be close to the subtleties of everyday life. For example, I think that Abi Freckleton's comment on the similarity between haiku and sculpture from the perspective of simplicity is not unrelated to this. It is no wonder that they can understand the essence of haiku so easily because they already have such an eye for contemporary art.

The third point is due to the fact that they create visual artworks. It seems that they can capture the essence of haiku well because their primary medium is not words, as Lisa Milroy says. I was once talking to an award-winning Japanese haiku poet, and he said; “I'm not good at writing things using words, so that's why I write haiku.” I used to think that people who write haiku are naturally interested in words and are good at expressing things with words, so I thought this was an astonishing confession. Haiku is indeed short. Therefore, it can be easy to understand even for people who are not good with words. Moreover, I think the somewhat contradictory and challenging intention of expressing something nonverbal in a verbal way is what forms the brevity of haiku. In other words, haiku is not a means of expression for people who are good with words, but rather the opposite. As if to confirm this, it is an interesting fact that in the English world, haiku is sometimes called a “wordless poem.” If this is the case, then the nonverbal act of creating visual haiku, like Marisa Culatto’s works, may be one of the best ways to get close to the essence of haiku. Or, as Olivia Bax pointed out, haiku, which alleviates the act of editing, seems almost liberating for the authors. The laborious act of editing that tends to accompany writing is greatly reduced here, and then haiku has the feeling of presenting words in their raw texture, making them closer to visual art than linguistic art.

In any case, the three elements mentioned above work synergistically, and as a result, contemporary English-speaking visual artists, who at first glance seem the farthest from the haiku-like environment, are surprisingly the ones who can accurately capture the essence of haiku. I think their answers are stimulating and full of insights even from a Japanese haiku poet's point of view.

Installation view. Foreground: Abi Freckleton. Background (left to right): Olivia Bax, Lisa Milroy, Ariko Inaoka.Installation view. Foreground: Abi Freckleton. Background (left to right): Olivia Bax, Lisa Milroy, Ariko Inaoka.

Links:

Yuzo Ono Yuzo Ono is a haiku poet and writer based in Japan. He studied at the University of Tokyo (BA) and the Royal College of Art (MRes, fine arts pathway) in the UK. He won the Modern Haiku Association Award for Criticism in 2002 and the Modern Haiku Association New Talent Award (honorable mention) in 2005. He is a councillor of the Haiku International Association and a member of the British Haiku Society.
website: https://yuzo-ono.com/