NOBUO KUBOTA "Hokusai Revisited," June 5 to July 18, 2010, Kelowna Art Gallery

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"Hokusai Revisited"

Nobuo Kubota, "Hokusai Revisited," laminated pine, painted and unpainted fir, video projection, 2008.

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"Hokusai Revisited"

Nobuo Kubota, "Hokusai Revisited," laminated pine, painted and unpainted fir, video projection, 2008.

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NOBUO KUBOTA

Hokusai Revisited, Kelowna Art Gallery, June 5 to July 18, 2010

BY: Portia Priegert

Nobuo Kubota pays tribute to influential Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai in an upcoming exhibition at the Kelowna Art Gallery called Hokusai Revisited, but his multi-media installation doesn’t mirror in material form paintings and woodblock prints by Hokusai, who lived from 1760 to 1848. Rather, Kubota, a first-generation Japanese-Canadian, evokes tangentially his predecessor’s interest in the forms and rhythms of nature.

Kubota uses undulating fir slats mounted on a structural support made from painted pine to suggest not only the symmetry and pattern of waves, but also the movement of a boat traversing them. Placed in the midst of a darkened gallery, the 10-meter-long structure is illuminated by four video projections of a waterfall. The projections send light cascading over the curved planks, creating a complex network of shadows on the gallery’s walls.

“We follow the structure pushing up and over itself and feel the undertow into its core,” curator Diane Pugen, a professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design, writes in the exhibition catalogue. “Immense shadows of giant waves, like looming tsunamis, rise up the walls. They spill onto the ceiling, whose surface comes alive with the projected movement of churning rapids, its flickering light animating the space as it dances over the fir.”

Kubota has long been interested in motion in space. “All things that occupy space are in motion, and that motion is in the form of waves,” arts writer Terrence Heath notes in the catalogue. “Water, air, sound, even the basic atomic structure of matter is incorporated in wave motion.” In talking about his work, Kubota has pointed to the influence of Buddhist concepts relating to the evolution of all matter, through cycles of creation and destruction. “My work is a combination of investigative thought process and intuition,” he says. “It is also a vehicle for creative and personal confrontation, and it gives me pleasure and satisfaction as well as anxiety and doubt.”

Hokusai Revisited, which Kubota created in 2008, finishes its four-stop exhibition tour in Kelowna, after three Ontario venues — the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, the Art Gallery of Peterborough and the Thames Art Gallery in Chatham. Kubota, who comes from a long line of Samurai, was born in Vancouver in 1932. He lived briefly in the Okanagan as a child after his family was interned with other Japanese Canadians in B.C.’s Slocan Valley during the Second World War. The family later relocated to Toronto, where Kubota studied architecture. He worked as an architect for eight years before turning to art.

Kubota has had a varied career as a sculptor, musician, performer and sound artist. He taught at the Ontario College of Art and Design for 24 years and has exhibited across Canada and in Europe. His work is in various public collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Winnipeg Art Gallery.