Essay: Kubota
Within the Circle of Light
Kubota, Itchiku. Ouka/The Beauty of a Weeping Cherry. From the Symphony of Light, the Itchiku Kubota Museum. May 5th, 2025. The Symphony of Light 24 - The Kubota Collection.
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(This piece was originally published in The Washington Review in 2001.)
During a recent visit to Washington, immediately following a depressing Senate session where government financing of the arts was criticized, I found myself wandering near the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Remembering that a fantastic exhibit of fabric design I had seen in Canada had recently moved to Washington I decided to see it once again. Maybe it would remind me what purpose is served by beautiful things, why museums turn the lights on in the morning and what we need artists for.
This exhibit was a collection of gigantic colorful kimonos standing with their backs to the viewer. This was not unlike the semi-circle of Senatorial backs I had just seen. Each kimono was painted with scenes of mountainous nature, each panel represented the progression of the seasons that began with early autumn and continued into late winter. Because each kimono merges into the next, when you stand back from the collection, they all combine into a single huge mountain range landscape. The ensemble goes under the title "The Symphony of Light". There is so much color and detail, for the synesthete, who enjoys colors as sounds, this display must be a crashing finale in which every orchestral possibility is realized.
The series is considered by the artist, Itchiku Kubota, to be his life's masterwork. The incredible effect of color is achieved by employing an ancient technique of tying and dyeing fabric called Tsujigahana. This technique Kubota discovered in a fragment of cloth he saw on a youthful visit to a Tokyo museum. Now in his seventies he has realized the successful end of his lifetime quest to rediscover and improve on the technique. But, in addition to the sheer visual virtuosity of his artistry, he has given us a presentation with strong conceptual content as well.
Besides painting and tapestry, Kubota has made a work of literature. Each of the thirty panels have titles which, listed completely, read like a poem. Each is a moment captured from life's many emotions and stages; "Desire for Wealth", "Temperance", "Uncertainty of Evening". As we progress through the maturity of the seasons and as the panels begin to represent the early stages of winter the title content changes also and begins to show a certain maturity of thought, "Certitude", for example and "Blue Trace of Hope in Sudden Snow". Each title offers a meditative topic to go with the scenery, like thoughts we bring with us on any walk in the woods. The last kimono, "Silver Purity", I found most moving. It depicts the mountains in a swirling snowscape, and in its whiteness it is as if all the colors of life have come to rest, static, like atoms near absolute zero, nearly motionless, only a trace of the world remains as vague shapes, yet the result is as deeply and profoundly moving and pleasurable as those moments just before sleep.
If a lifetime of walks could somehow be recalled at once in a single scene, if our lifetime pilgrimage could be displayed all together, one would hope to have achieved such a beautiful landscape. Just standing at the opening to the half circle of kimonos, looking at the broad mountain landscape that these individual panels collectively create, I found that a few children attending the exhibit, held in front of their parents by the shoulders, reminded me of foreshortened shadows of trees foresting the central space. The longer I stood, the more I relaxed, got bored, and my mind wandered to and from the fabric to the people around me, and to my own thoughts and problems. It was not unlike the meditative state of a walk in the woods. In the same way a cloud opens, and light falls through to illuminate the forest floor, I visualized purely imaginary scenes deep down in this vast landscape. I thought of details in the woods, caught in a trembling spot of sunlight, a beetle, black, moving across brown pine needles on the forest floor, near a bit of dark rock protruding from green ferns. The flora and the beetle, in a small circle of roots at the base of a gigantic tree, were like actors in a circular theater, or were also like, I suddenly realized, museum visitors. Zooming back up to reality I recognized the top of that very tree just under a cloud.
The longer I stood and absorbed the detail, the overwhelming detail, the more the conceptual nature of the work began to deepen. The two dimensional suddenly transformed into dimensional multiples. Looking at the medium of fabric, the kimonos, I realized that I was looking at gigantic figures, with their backs to me, with faces and character I cannot and forever will not see. This art depicts gods who are clothed in the world, light reflecting off the fabric of things. The movement of their shoulders as they shrug and walk through the universe is what makes the clouds move, mists cling, water and shadows change and tangle in the mountains, making me think that all reality is only perceptible as a shimmering on the backs of gods as they move through time.
Because all the seasons are represented as one landscape, the artist has changed the nature of that element as well, freezing it. The natural sessions of nature are a measure of time, like a clock with the seasons as hands. It is Autumn O'clock, 2000, it is Winter O'clock, 2001. But this work of art makes a clock that never advances the year, with hands that always return to Spring. The artist has created a magic circle within which one can live forever, the fables of the fairy circle come true. This is a place where, if a person stays, for even what seems a moment, like Rip Van Winkle, when they step out of the circle, the same age as before, the old familiar world will have changed dramatically and forever.
In all, I saw more than one hundred lives pass through this landscape, circling from autumn to winter, some slower, some faster, and then they would exit around the corner, the mists of mortality trailing from their shoulders. All of us who love art and recognize in it the infinite can say to those parties who would de-emphasize the arts, who ignore it, who pass it by-- "You have not fully lived". To stroll through Kubota's "Symphony of Light" is to experience an inkling of the eternal.
(Originally published in The Washington Review, 2001.)