Background
Shigemori Mirei was born on August 20, 1896 in Okayama, Japan.
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Moss garden at Tōfuku-ji
1939
Horai Garden, Shofuen of Matsunoo-taisha, Kyoto
1975
Shigemori Mirei
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In 1917, Shigemori entered the Tokyo Fine Arts School to study nihonga, or Japanese painting, and later completed a graduate degree from the Department of Research.
Career
In the early 1920s, Shigemori tried extensively to found a school of Japanese Culture, Bunka Daigakuin to synthesize the teaching of culture, but was foiled by the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, which forced him to move back to his hometown near Kyoto.
He also intended to create a new style of ikebana,or flower arrangement, and produced art criticism and history writings, including the Complete Works of Japanese Flower Arrangement Art published in 1930, and the New Ikebana Declaration written with Sofu Teshigahara and Bunpo Nakayama in 1933. Throughout his later gardening career, he maintained a voice in avant garde criticism of ikebana through publishing Ikebana Geijutsu magazine beginning in 1950, and through the founding of an ikebana study group called Byakutosha in 1949.
At the same time, he cultivated an interest and knowledge in traditional Japanese gardens. He co-founded the Kyoto Rinsen Kyokai with others in 1932. After the destruction caused by the Muroto typhoon in 1934, he began a survey of significant gardens in Japan. In 1938, he finished publishing the 26-volume Illustrated Book on the History of the Japanese Garden, an unprecedented and meticulous documentation of major gardens in the country which he revised in 1971, shortly before his death.
He began practicing as a garden designer in 1914 with a garden and tea room on his family’s property. His first major work was a design for the garden at Tofuku-ji Temple in 1939. He designed 240 gardens, and worked mostly in karesansui, or dry landscape gardens. Many of his gardens are on existing religious sites, but a few of his works are in cultural or commercial settings. He also collaborated with Isamu Noguchi in choosing stones for the UNESCO Garden in Paris.
Shigemori’s work and writings reflect and interface with the changing political and cultural framework of Japan during his life. Kendall Brown, in his preface to Mirei Shigemori: Rebel in the Garden notes that “Shigemori embodies the central artistic quest of his era – a new direction in Japanese creativity founded on the desire to overcome a fundamental tension between the perceived polarities of dynamic Western Culture and the relative stasis attributed to the Asian tradition.
He was trained in nihonga, or Japanese painting, and drew on the traditional arts of ikebana (flower arrangement), and chadō (tea ceremony), and Shinto, Buddhist, and Taoist cosmological ideas in his work. At the same time, his work is closely tied to theories of the Primitive Modern explored by artists and architects like Isamu Noguchi, Kenzo Tange, and ikebana artists Sofu Teishigahara and Shuzo Takiguchi. This movement drew on the energy of Japanese prehistoric arts of the Yayoi and Jōmon periods, and allowed artists to “radicalize existing practices within the Japanese framework and thereby transcend the dichotomy of Japanese ‘tradition’ and western ‘modernity’”:16 In his gardens, Shigemori recovers the primordial power that the Shinto tradition attributed to nature, yet works as a modernist artist-hero to innovate a traditional Japanese garden typology.
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References
- Contemporary Garden Aesthetics, Creations and Interpretations (Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium Series in the History of Landscape Architecture)
- The World of the Japanese Garden: from Chinese Origins to Modern Landscape Art / with Color Photographs by Takeji Iwamiya
- JAPANESE GARDENS: RIGHT ANGLE AND NATURAL FORM
- Mirei Shigemori: Modernizing the Japanese Garden
