Japan in the artistic creation of Fernando Lemos
Calligraphy, photography, engraving and drawn gesture
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Date
- / Cancelled / Sold out
Location
Engawa Gulbenkian GardenIn Portuguese, with simultaneous translation to English and Portuguese Sign Language interpretation.
Pricing
- Free entry
In the context of the exhibition ‘The Occidental Calligrapher’, which reflects on the relationship between the work of the artist Fernando Lemos and Japan, Rosely Nakagawa, Alexandra Curvelo and Ryuta Imafuku come together for a conversation moderated by CAM curator Leonor Nazaré.
Calligraphy, humanity’s primordial impulse to ‘write’ and ‘draw’ (Imafuku), took Fernando Lemos to Japan in 1963, with a grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
In this talk, the influence of Japanese painting in the drawings, calligraphy and in the work of the artist Fernando Lemos will be addressed from this principle, broadening the thinking about the confluence of Western and Eastern cultures to other facets of the image and creative production.
Engawa – A Season of Contemporary Art from Japan
‘Engawa’ is a programming that brings to Lisbon a set of creators from Japan and the Japanese diaspora, many of them for the first time in Portugal. More info
Biographies
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Rosely Nakagawa
Rosely Nakagawa is an independent curator who graduated in Architecture from FAUUSP in 1977 and specialised in Museology in 1979 at the University of São Paulo. She created the first gallery dedicated to photography in São Paulo, Galeria FOTOPTICA, with Thomaz Farkas in 1979. As a curator, she has held exhibitions at Pinacoteca, MASP, MAC, MAM do Estado de São Paulo, Museu Nacional de Brasília and Itau, among others. Abroad, she has curated projects at MOMA PS1, the Guggenheim, the Nagoya Metropolitan Museum and Galeria 111. She has curated exhibitions by artists such as Fabrizio Plessi and Luise Weiss, among others.
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Ryuta Imafuku
Ryuta Imafuku is an anthropologist, a cultural critic and professor emeritus at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. As visiting professor at the Centre for Japanese Studies at the University of São Paulo (2000) and at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (2003), he has constantly contributed to the development of Cultural Studies in Brazil and other regions of Latin America, the Caribbean islands and the East Asian archipelago. Among other publications, he wrote The Heterology of Culture, Homo Ludens in Brazil and Archipel-Monde.
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Alexandra Curvelo
Alexandra Curvelo is an Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of Universidade Nova de Lisboa and holds a PhD in History of Art on the subject of Nanban Art and its Circulation between Asia and America: Japan, China and New Spain (c.1550 – c.1700). She is the Director of the Institute of Art History (IHA) and Associate Researcher at the Portuguese Centre for Global History (CHAM) at NOVA FCSH. Her research focuses on the visual and material culture of modern Japan during the Iberian presence and on the processes of cultural transfer between Asia and the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries.
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Leonor Nazaré
Leonor Nazaré (Caldas da Rainha, 1963) has a PhD in Contemporary Art from the College of Arts of the University of Coimbra, in 2017, and has been an advisor and curator at CAM since 1999. Nazaré has been an art critic since 1989: she was a permanent contributor to the newspaper Expresso between 89 and 97 and an occasional contributor to some national and foreign art magazines. She was a member of the governing body of the Portuguese section of AICA (International Association of Art Critics) from 2004 to 2012. Since 2016, she has coordinated the digital catalogue of ‘História das Exposições de Arte da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian’.
Programme
15:00 / Introduction
15:10 / The image and the gesture in black and white
The path of Fernando Lemos is made of black and white gestures traced by the artist in various forms of expression. We will reflect on the relationship of his drawings, engravings and photography with his writing. The power of the gesture can be seen as part of the construction of an aesthetic, literary and plastic imagery, materialized in his works as leftover objects or proof of his work.
15:30 / Archipelago of the calligraphic imagination
Calligraphy is a universal form of humanity's creative imagination. From an art history perspective, it is believed that this aesthetic form originated in East Asia. Going beyond this genealogical thinking, we can look at calligraphy as a global "constellation" or "archipelago" created by the dynamic interaction of cultures, and to place Fernando Lemos within this constellation.
15:50 / Learning to see. Japan in Fernando Lemos
In an interview in 2009, Fernando Lemos said that it was in Japan that he realised the importance of photographic recording in the process of learning to write (calligraphy) and draw: ‘In Japan, I realised that children first learn to photograph and only then to write and draw. They record images and only then learn the acts of writing and drawing. (...) It's not about becoming artists, it's about learning to see things.’
Taking this excerpt as a starting point, I propose to analyse the work of Fernando Lemos that is most closely associated with Japan, the series of photographs he made in the 1960s and the Indian ink and watercolour works on Japanese paper, highlighting some of the Japanese aesthetic principles that underlie them and their relationship with time and space.
16:10 / Talk
Moderated by:
16:30 / Q&A
16:45 / Closing
Support
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