Tetsuya Noda
Early life, family and education. Noda was born in the Shiranui Township of Uki, Kumamoto Prefecture, on 5 March 1940. In 1959, he entered the Department of Oil Painting, Faculty of Fine Arts, Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (presently Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music), and graduated in 1963. In 1965, Noda completed graduate course at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. Noda was a student of Tadashige Ono in the art of woodblock printmaking. In June 1971, Noda married Dorit Bartur, the daughter of Moshe Bartur, then the Israeli  ambassador to Japan. In 1972, their first son Izaya was born in October; and in 1974 their first daughter Rika was born in November. (S) = SOLO EXHIBITION, Major exhibitions. (G) = GROUP EXHIBITION Works. In the British Museum Magazine, Timothy Clark, the keeper of Japanese section wrote “In nearly fifty years, Noda has created some 500 further works that continue his mesmerizing ‘Diary’ series, using the unique combination of color woodblock and photo-based silkscreen onto handmade Japanese paper that he has made his own. Personal snapshots are rigorously reworked to become subtle mementos of universal significance: ‘what’s  in a life?’ we are constantly prompted to ask.” In the video entitled "Making Beauty: Noda Tetsuya", published by The British Museum on October 11, 2018, Noda and Clark discuss the concept and technique used in achieving the look and feel of the Noda's works. Concept. Since 1968, Noda’s works have been inspired by themes of his own life. It is a visual autobiography and the motif is a comment on his daily life - his family, people he knows, his children’s growth and scenery along his way. He takes photographs of what he sees and likes, then  develops and retouches them with pencil or brushes. His works are done using materials close at hand. On the concept of visual autobiography, Robert Flynn Johnson stated, "To think that one's life is important enough to make it the focus of one's art can be an act of pure folly and egotistical pride or it can involve a humbling and sincere self-examination that draw on observation of small universal truths. It is clear that in a career of nearly forty years of creating an artistic world made at paper and ink, Tetsuya Noda has followed the latter , quieter path." In the age of social media, some critics are quick to see the parallelism of Noda's visual autobiography and popular social media sites. In 2016, a newspaper pointed out "In this era of social networking, it isn’t unusual for our friends to frequently post photos of the mundane happenings of our lives—a laughing baby, a just-read book, our lunch, a selfie—on Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat. But for renowned contemporary Japanese artist Tetsuya Noda, documenting the ordinary details of his daily life is something he has done for almost 50 years." When asked about  how he found his theme; “Diary as an opportunity”, he replied, “at the university I was not at all satisfied with the assignment of painting nudes, it did not seem the right way to express myself.” His independent thinking and determination were highly rewarded. “I started to use a mimeograph cutting machine for the photo images in addition to the woodblock printmaking techniques.” In 1968, four years after he graduated from the university, he received the International Grand Prize at the 6th Tokyo International Print Biennale; “for the audacious combination of photography with traditional woodblock print." Techniques. Each print is  created through a unique and multilayered method he himself developed. He begins by selecting a photograph, taken on the day of the title, that he manipulates in various ways. First he adds drawn elements—such as lines or shading—and whites out other aspects of the image. The altered photo is then scanned in an old-fashioned mimeograph machine, a process that creates a stencil of the image. Next Noda takes a sheet of handmade Japanese paper which he uses for all of his prints and applies subtle color through traditional woodblock technique. Finally he silkscreens his manipulated photo over  the top and adds his signature, his name along with an inked thumbprint. Photography. On the use of photographs, Noda concluded the difference between his approach to photography and that of the Pop artist, "Andy Warhol used photographs of Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Onassis (then Kennedy), but notice that the subjects are famous people, and the photographs themselves had already appeared dozens of times in the mass media. I never use photos taken by other people. My photos are all my own." Japanese art critic Yoshiaki Tono (one of the “three greats” of Japanese art criticism) pointed out that "Where  the Pop artists are concerned with America, with the iconography of a particular age and culture, with anonymous colloquialisms, Noda deals with something much more personal. His main subject is ordinariness - the ordinariness of individual people. Warhol's "Jackie" is the face of a whole period in American life. Imposed on it is an image of Americana during the convulsive sixties. Noda's 1968 prints are of a different dimension." Education. As an educator, April Vollmer, artist and author of "Japanese Woodblock Print Workshop: A Modern Guide to the Ancient Art of Mokuhanga" wrote, "Today most art training takes place  in universities, and two prominent Japanese artists—Tetsuya Noda at Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku) and Akira Kurosaki at Kyoto Seika University—are largely responsible for the new international wave of Mokuhanga (Woodblock printing in Japan) awareness. Noda headed the woodblock department at Tokyo Geidai from 1991 until his retirement in 2007. Cultural exchange and the promotion of Japanese art forms are both part of the university’s mission, and Noda spearheaded an innovative program in which traditional Ukiyo-e master printers came each year from the Adachi Institute to work with students, providing a link between  the traditional workshop system and the modern university. He also nurtured contacts with the West, and his 2004 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Asian Art clearly showed the influence of his study of Western art, combining Mokuhanga backgrounds photo-screenprinted scenes of everyday life. In 1998 Noda came to Columbia University’s LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies to teach mokuhanga to New York area printmakers. Many of the artists now teaching mokuhanga internationally studied with Noda, including Seiichiro Miida (who has now taken Noda’s place at Tokyo Geidai), Raita Miyadera (also at Tokyo Geidai), Michael Schneider  (Austria), Tyler Starr (US), Roslyn Kean (Australia), and others from Turkey to Korea to Pakistan." Evaluation. Lawrence Smith, formerly Keeper of Japanese Antiquities at The British Museum wrote, "He is a master in at least four artistic genres , all of them closely related to painting. If considered as a printmaker, no Japanese can remotely equal his range of subject… Noda is unquestionably the greatest Japanese printmaker alive. But if considered as a creator of work very close to painting, one has also to ask what living Japanese could be considered his equal… but in my view not one of them  can rival his remarkable range of subjects and emotions". Edward Lucie-Smith, English art critic, curator and broadcaster, on “Japanese artists who have built major international careers”, and in the context of Yayoi Kusama’s “distinctively Japanese extension of the Pop sensibility”, and Takashi Murakami’s “traditionally Japanese origins of their imagery”, situated between them is, “Another well-known Japanese artist who stresses the international, cross-cultural aspect of his work is Tetsuya Noda. Noda’s visual diaries tell the story of his mixed marriage to an Israeli woman, using photo-based imagery. the most obviously Japanese thing about them  is their immaculately skillful use of print-making techniques.” Mário Pedrosa, preeminent critic of art, culture, and politics and one of Latin America's most frequently cited public intellectuals, in a letter to Noda, praised, "Since the Bienal "(sic)" of Prints, when I had the joy of taking contact with your creative work, I always thought of how original and strong was the expression of your art.” Daniel Bell talking about the originality of Noda's prints says, "Noda's distinctiveness lies in three things: the remarkably consistent subject matter of his work, the structure and configurations of his compositions , and the novel techniques, consciously derived from Ukiyo-e, as the means of realizing his intentions." Robert Flynn Johnson, curator in charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco wrote, “it is Tetsuya Noda who stands as the most original, innovative, and thought-provoking Japanese printmaker of his era". Steven Co, art collector wrote, "Tetsuya Noda’s Diary Series is a visual map of temporal, personal, experiential, and lyrical moments. Noda strives to preserve memory with the objectivity of his camera, but then disrupts the resulting photograph with the subjectivity of his  pencils and brushes before committing the memory to a print. As if to ensure that a memory is engraved into his mind, he would repeatedly retreat to that memory with rigor and vigor by personally pulling each print by hand. The result and effect are quiet and understated accounts of memories revisited, reassessed, and repeatedly asserted through this labor-intensive process. Mr. Noda’s works are as much about the process of making them as the pleasingly introspective and sensitive result of a single work or his whole body of works". Yusuke Nakahara, art critic (one of the “three greats ” of Japanese art criticism), wrote on Tetsuya Noda's use of photograph in his works, "Noda has succeeded in capturing the unique quality that had been captured in any other photographic art work before which could only be seen through a camera. This is the special quality that Noda possesses that others have difficulty to realize in their work. That is the recollective quality that a photograph evokes which one must say gives a photograph its unique quality. This recollected quality is none other than the ability that a photograph has, to record an event, that brings out the human  emotion, and in Noda's works I feel that these feelings are strongly expressed." Professor Linda C. Ehrlich, when writing on the relationship of Japanese visual arts and Japanese cinema, stressed not to overlook the influence of the more contemporary “creative print” (sōsaku-hanga) on Japanese films that feature a formalistic playfulness and daringness. Ehrlich stated that, “Noda Tetsuya’s large-scale diary pages based on family photographs, with their seemingly mundane, yet resonant, themes.” invokes J. Thomas Rimer’s view on sōsaku-hanga’s sense of “muted realism” and “a sense of craft rooted in instinctive apprehension of the  power, the wholeness, of nature itself.” And it is this sense of “muted realism,” in which “the wholeness of nature and the everyday are joyfully celebrated.” Emmanuel Madec, on his analysis of Tetsuya Noda's work, the photographer and curator wrote, "At first sight, his approach is that of a diarist. In Noda’s case, it is about an enumeration of daily objects, places, events whose banality is counterbalanced by the scale of the works. The status of subjects and objects is reversed. Diary; Feb. 14th '92 shows us an ashtray cluttered with many cigarette butts, which obviously is of  great triviality; but the point of view adopted for the photograph makes it graphically remarkable. It is the format of this image (89.6 x 129.5 cm) that gives an aura to this object of which, while so commonplace at first sight, puts it front and centre as a marker of time. The object is now not only an object, it becomes a situation. With Noda, he is first a photographer. Taking pictures serves the need to check on reality. Then, discovering the image always comes from the separation between reality, memory and image, between which we can witness the gaps . But what is most striking here is that the process is transversely extended from engraving and then to screen printing. Extending the photographic image to a second medium is both over-appropriation and over-exploitation of the matter / image to extract possibilities. Noda's images thus pose as hybrids, the fruit of interbreeding between photography and engraving, propitious to probing into the profound essence of existence. Because Tetsuya Noda’s Diary is part of an elaboration of time: time of existence and time of the work that the serial reproduction confirms; therefore a proof and affirmation of the personal history  of its author, as imprint of his attempt to take on time." Alan G. Artner, an art critic, wrote "Many of the gratifications here come from the craft that late 20th Century art tended to downplay. The artist looks to have been unmoved by any fad or fashion and unashamedly demonstrates again and again how much work really goes into a work of art. If his exploration of friends and family does not hold your interest, the personal way in which he sets everything down may very well, as it shows a powerful melding of tradition and individual talent. Everything  he sees is firm and solid and viewed with winning appreciation." Gilles Bechet, an art critic, wrote "Contemplative explorer of everyday life, the Japanese artist (Tetsuya Noda) transposes his works into a diary in images of a disturbing sweetness that mix photography, drawing, screen printing and woodblock. An overflowing ashtray, fruits from the market, a shelf full of banal objects or candid portraits of his daughter, their pictorial treatment acquired the density of suspended time. A time that will not come back but remains archived forever." " Joey Ho Chong I, art curator, wrote "Noda's Diary series reminds me of  an adapted quote from Qing dynasty poet ZhaWeiren: what used to be the zither, chess, wine and flowers in calligraphy and painting; is now the rice, oil, salt, sauce, vinegar and tea. It is extraordinary that ordinary things in life, under the unique interpretation of Noda, can possess such intelligence and timelessness, making things strange yet intimate. His works allow us to walk through his life and make us feel as if we were part of him or his family. We can silently experience his joys and sorrows, and quietly walk along with him through his life journey. It is  his ability to negotiate with that close and distant home in his heart that allows us to understand the meaning of life in the ordinary." Janice Katz, Associate Curator of Japanese Art at the Art Institute Chicago wrote, “his focus on familiar and personal imagery almost feels like an attempt to stop time. The intensely personal subject matter of his images are in contrast to his printmaking technique, which renders his subjects mysterious and veiled. They are a bit hazy and unclear, creating a distance between the viewer and the image. The loving care that Noda expends on the creation  of a print, making it beautiful and detailed, infusing it with mystery and uncertainty, makes me think that he is not preserving memory so much as creating the scene the way it appears in his memory. In the process of creation, he gets to spend more time with each of these moments—the wish of every parent, surely—even as he alters them." Public collections. Tetsuya Noda's works are widely collected around the world by both generalist museums (national museums, fine art museums, modern art museum and contemporary art museums) and specialist museums (photography, print and graphic art). AUSTRALIA  BELGIUM CANADA CHILE CHINA CZECH REPUBLIC FINLAND GERMANY ISRAEL JAPAN KOREA NORWAY POLAND SLOVENIA UNITED KINGDOM UNITED STATES OF AMERICA