Influenced by systemic painting and conceptual art of the 60s and 70s, Hideki Nakazawa’s works forge a connection between structures, mathematics, digital technology and graphics to create pieces that have been challenging the Japanese art scene since the early 1990s. His persistent preoccupation with the systematic techniques he develops and explores to produce his art, established a new movement in contemporary Japanese art coined by Nakazawa as “Methodicism”. These inventions, taking form in method paintings, patents, writings, and the software invention “Digital Nendo” of the mid 90s (patented in 1998-2001 and facilitates 3D bitmap paintings on a PC) have been fuelling Nakazawa’s art ever since and eloquently bridge between Dadaist notions such as Kurt Schwitters’ cut and paste techniques and his Ursonate music compositions, Sol Lewitt’s conceptual structures, and the Superflat works of the likes of Murakami.

This exhibition explores the relevance of Nakazawa’s 1990s pieces nowadays and seeks to reinvestigate their impact on the new generation of contemporary Japanese art. Nakazawa’s obsession with associating contemporary art and critical issues with Japanese subculture no doubt has inspired and assisted the birth of the current art scene of Japan with the works of young collectives such as Chim↑Pom and Shibuhouse (who both exhibited previously at The Container), and the followers of Nakazawa, New Method. His “old school” graphics and conceptual pattern paintings, using pixels or typography, still look fresh as ever and maintain a strong sense of contemporaneity.

The installation Essay on Invisible Functions from 1996 explores his fascination with the relation between text, sound, and graphics. This graphical representation which he named “Silly CG” (silly computer graphics) impacted related industries worldwide and largely has been abandoned by Nakazawa’s art practice the following year. The interactive nature of the installation though and the associative nature of it, has a child-like quality that captures the imagination of young viewers and a conceptual layering that resonates with the older audience. It may look like a retro video game, but his associative use of language examines the conceptual, functional, and pictorial interrelationships of text and image as explored in the most recent critical theory.

The exhibition also presents two light boxes Letter-Coordinate Painting No.1 of 29 Letters by 29 Lines and Letter-Coordinate Painting No. 2 of 29 Letters by 29 Lines both from 1997. The works, represent Nakazawa’s “method paintings,” are a conceptual exercise forming a visual pattern with no intention to create any linguistic sense. Comprising of Chinese characters (Kanji) and Japanese phonetic characters (Hiragana), in painting No. 1, the Kanji letters, represent the Chinese five elements “Gogyo”—tree, fire, earth, gold, and water—which are inserted in order on a grid to replace every dot on a bitmap computer graphic, while painting No. 2, makes use of the fractal method termed the Hilbert Curve. In between the Kanji characters you would find Hiragana letters, as in the alphabetical order, inserted upside-down, devoid of linguistic or phonetic meaning. There are no chances here—every position is immaculately calculated and structured and produces an impeccable composition of mathematical order and perfect aesthetics.