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Tokyo-based Yumiko Tanno combines imprints of gossamer weave with fine red lines to create works that have the ineffable quality of stillness in movement.
Using ink-dyed gauze pressed onto acid-free paper—the type used for Japanese woodblock printing—her style is unique even in Japan. Tanno also works in watercolour and charcoal, but her passion is for the kind of work you see here, which explores the transparency and airy lightness of the fine, open-weave textile.
 There is something about Yumiko Tanno’s work that makes you think of the work of legendary calligraphic artist Toko Shinoda: something in the way that she gives so much "weight" to white space and also something about those gashes of red that contrast with the sepia-black imprints of gossamer that have become her trademark.
But Tanno’s art does not emerge from the Japanese calligraphic tradition. She never studied brush and ink work (though she wishes she had); nor does she think there was ever an overt influence from Japanese traditional culture on her art. However, she did tell me that she grew up in a traditional Japanese house of such architectural significance it has since become a National Cultural Treasure.
“When I was little we lived in a – what I now realize – was a fabulous old Japanese house which had been built by our rich sea merchant forebears. It was trendily modern for the time it was built, at the end of the feudal period, for it even had a Western-style wing with art deco trim. That wing must have made an impression on me as a little girl because I find myself even now wishing I could recreate those rooms in my own home.”
At the time, though, it was nothing but a musty old-fashioned Japanese house to the young Tanno whose parents, finding it impossible to maintain, were selling off its contents bit by bit.
She now wonders whether the Japanese beauty that surrounded her had an influence subliminally, but her university studies were in German literature and her first attempts at painting were with surrealism. Painting gave way to an interest in copper etching and in the process of wiping the ink from the copper plates using scraps of a fine hand-woven Japanese netting called kanreisha, she discovered that the ink-soaked cloth pressed onto paper created intriguing effects. Working with a mechanical press and a finer gauze cloth, she started to get even more beautiful results.
Commentators on an exhibition she gave in Switzerland described her gauze imprints as looking like “angel wings.” In some of the gauze works she embedded actual feathers and one of those works was chosen for the cover of a seminal book on semantics.
Tanno’s particular genius, in addition to her very Japanese way with negative space, is the subtlety of her “shading,” which is particularly appealing when several layers of gauze printing is involved. One shadowy imprint gives way to a more distinct one and then often finally to the actual gauze cloth left pressed on the paper. She does not use black alone finding it too “vulgar” and prefers to soften the colour with sepia. One of her favorite works is a pair of wing-like impressions made on separate sheets of paper in subtly different shades of white with this sepia-black ink.
Tanno has been exhibiting overseas for the past decade, notably in Switzerland, Germany and Hungary. Though her work is informed by the elegant refinement of classical Japanese art, it has a strong contemporary feel that makes it speak in all languages.
Background: Born 1948 Okayama Prefecture, Japan. Graduated Keio University, Tokyo. Now lives in Tokyo.
Major overseas exhibitions:
1994 &2000: Japanese Artists Exhibition, Fribourg, Switzerland.
1998: Obent Gallery Resensburg, Germany (one-person show)
2005 Senza Frontiere Contemporary Art International, Csurgo Museum, Hungary
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