The Surrealist Work of Fuyuko Matsui
Thinking about contemporary artists that could also be considered surrealists, one of the names that jumped out at me was the Japanese artist Fuyuko Matsui. She is known for creating artworks that are steeped in Japanese tradition and myths while also putting a modern spin on these concepts. She expresses things such as pain and suffering that are usually not easily portrayed through visual means. She tends focus on this idea of pain because she feels that it is a very solitary feeling and that it can be hard for others to understand what is going on inside of you just from the outside world. She tries to find ways to makes the viewer understand and feel the pain by embellishing these elements of death and decay. The author Anna Maria Sienicka describes this in the following quote.
“Matsui's work takes up the elements that led to this perversion by amplifying them, while giving a feminine interpretation of the exhibition of female and bruised bodies, which she embodies, paradoxically, in women with serene faces. Perversion, in the sense that we understand it throughout this article, is not a formal disfigurement of the canon, but a recovery at the root of the object in order to corrupt its foundation and achieve the integrity of the original work. What does this perversion reveal about our disturbing relationship, both fascinated and repugnant, to the body in putrefaction or monstrous, and how does Matsui transcribe it formally? How is female pain translated into works arousing male desire?”
Through these surreal paintings of often ghostly figures of women, Matsui’s artwork aims to help the viewer understand the pain and the suffering of women in general. Even if the viewer may not fully understand the Japanese traditions and myths that inspire the work, or fully understand what is happening beneath the surface, the viewer is still able to understand the pain and suffering that the subjects of her paintings are going through. Many of her artworks are inspired by artists, such as Frieda Kahlo, who also depict such pain in their artworks. In their ambiguous narrative quality, Matsui’s work also resembles that of the British-born surrealist, Leonora Carrington.
Fuyuko Matsui, Nyctalopia, 2005. Color on silk, hanging scroll 138.4×49.5cm
The painting Nyctalopia is inspired by the Japanese style of art called yūrei – ga, which depicts ghostly or spectral forms who typically have long, messy black hair, and a thin and almost fragile appearance which makes them seem more ghostly. They are typically wearing a white or light-colored kimono or something similar to a kimono. According to Japanese folklore this type of ghost is a vengeful spirit who has unfinished business tying its spirit to the living. In its right hand the spirit is holding a dead rooster by its legs. The rooster has an almost skeletal and fragile appearance with most of its feathers plucked off. It also appears as though you can almost see through the figure’s translucent skin. Matsui brings up the issue of gender in this painting by creating the contrast between the female ghost of the vengeful spirit who is holding a rooster, a male chicken. This was probably intentionally done in order to further drive home the myth of these Japanese spirts. Anna Maria Siennicka describes the rooster in the following quote.
“Heralding the beginning of the day and the end of the night, the crowing of the rooster muffled by the murderous hand of the specter – creature of the night – symbolically traps the spectator in an endless night. The apparition creates a kind of suspension in the narrative logic, it breaks the sense that forces us, in the scandalous seduction it exerts on us, to an involuntary contemplation.”
The lines of the rooster’s limp body allow for the viewer’s eyes to follow the lines of the ghostly figure towards the woman’s face, which is mostly covered in her long black hair. Despite this, her face is one of the more defined parts of her figure. She appears to be staring off into the distance at something that is off the canvas. Even though she is angled partly away from the viewer it still appears as though the viewer could be the person that she is looking at.
Fuyuko Matsui, Keeping Up the Pureness, 2004. Color on silk, hanging scroll, 29.5×79.3cm
In the painting, Jousou no jizoku, which translates as Keeping Up the Pureness, and which is the first part of “Kuso-zu”, or the Nine Aspects of Decomposition series in which represents the nine stages of the body decomposing, Matsui depicts a nude woman lying in what appears to be a field or pond with flowers surrounding her. The woman is shown with a slit that goes from her chest down to her pelvis, with her organs spilling out. When the viewer starts to look closer at the woman’s figure they may take note of certain details, such as the fact that all the blood has started to drain from her heart and that it has an almost pale and translucent color to it. When you look closer at the woman’s uterus you will notice that there is an embryo curled up inside it, probably in the first few months of pregnancy. The woman’s head is also turned towards the viewer; although she is dead her eyes are still slightly opened and she has an almost victorious smile on her face. In an interview in the Tate, the author Yuko Hasegawa talks about how Matsui describes her inspiration behind the painting in the following quote.
“The woman has slit open her stomach to flaunt her uterus. The flowers that swirl around her are also displaying their female parts, as though attuned to this act. Her face conveys pride and satisfaction because she has carried it out herself. The work also addresses men with a possible desire to commit rape. The pain that she has passively accepted to date as a woman – the pain of being a victim, as well as the pain associated with the fear of retaliation either against the perpetrator or, at times, against herself – is now the driving force behind her power and strength.”
Matsui is able to incorporate the Buddhist message about purifying one’s soul in order to become one’s truest self while also examining how others are view someone and how that perception changes once someone is dead. Matsui has also stated that she is inspired by the Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva, and the Japanese feminist critic Chizuko Ueno, who both refer to their own experiences with the process of being cast off from the typical norms of society. Like these writers, Matsui transforms the conventions of beauty through anger and aggression by depicting the female body in a horrifying and unappealing way which results in a depiction that is unappealing to the male gaze. Anna Maria Sienicka describes this in the following quote.
“This aspect takes on its full meaning in the representations of kusōzu , since usually this type of work exposes the entrails and brings out what is internal, but within the framework of the natural process of decomposition. Here, Matsui's kusōzu pervert the objective of the genre, since it is about a body having made the conscious decision to exhibit its entrails, as in an act of vanity. This perversion corresponds to a reversal of the initial intention of the kusōzu , and to the incorporation of details (such as the fetus) breaking the traditional coherence of the image represented.”
Fuyuko Matsui, Scattered Deformities in the End, 2007. Color on silk, hanging scroll 124.3×97.4cm
The third and final painting by Matsui that I found to be surreal was Scattered Deformities in the End; which depicts a naked woman running through a field at night. She is being attacked by a dog and a flock of birds who are grabbing at her long black hair and limbs while tearing apart her skin. She appears to have one long cut across her back, and several smaller cuts across her arms and legs, her organs and muscles are being pulled out from within her by the flock of birds and the dog. In the trees there are even more birds that are watching her be attacked. This painting depicts the female body as prey struggling to escape.
In conclusion, Fuyuko Matsui creates surrealist works of art that combine elements of traditional Japanese art with modern day subject matter that revolves around how women must deal with pain and suffering. Her work is reminiscent of Frida Kahlo’s portrayal of her own pain while also taking inspiration from the way Leonora Carrington tells stories through her surrealist works of art. But Matsui’s body of work draws on distinctly Japanese mythology and imagery and has a darker, more visceral tone.
