Aki Kuroda - Hamlet
Hamlet illustrated by Aki Kuroda available here.
The world of Shakespeare is legendary. Alfred Hitchcock said it was one of his most intimate fantasy worlds. This makes you think that there are very few people who would not like to see themselves in these pages, occupied by the passion, the anguish or even the madness that characterizes all its protagonists.
Kuroda tried to capture the mystery and immense sadness of this character, as well as its varieties. His love takes on a different meaning when we see him as an unhappy prince or as a disenchanted young man who abandons his actions for those of others.
He applied the same rigor to the illustrations of this Shakespeare masterpiece which is considered one of the greatest examples of tragedy.
Fourth cover
After Un amour de Swann decorated by Pierre Alechinsky, Éditions Gallimard gives carte blanche to an artist who has chosen to invest the world of William Shakespeare. “To be or not to be,” Aki Kuroda tells us, is a phrase that lived through my childhood without me really knowing its context.” As an adult, he developed a real passion for this text by the English playwright which was a real source of inspiration. “This is a truly collaborative work with Shakespeare that extends beyond time and space.” “I called William and we talked about it,” he explains.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Aki Kuroda
Aki Kuroda was needed to hold the rope against Shakespeare's Hamlet. The text risked eating the image. And it was not easy to find a shield against the play which devours everything – even its characters.
Faced with a kill – since everything ends with a “Come on, give the order to the soldiers to shoot” – Kuroda was able to offer both the same, the dissimilar and the disparate in a whole set of inserts where the shapes are discovered as we move forward. So much so that the book can be read and viewed as an almost pious work. But faithful to the text, the works nevertheless remain full of disarray and discord.
Kuroda therefore adds his touches to the text, which is a real challenge. The image does not illustrate Shakespearean tragedy: it “ presages” it » as he “ dissembles” her ". Hamlet's terrifying power is matched by the astonishment of the images. The format of the book gives them all their power. Especially since Kuroda's art does not spread out, it condenses by transposing the text into another field of perception, not only intellectual but sensory.
The hallucination caused by Hamlet's "dream" therefore finds a conversion by surface effect. The pictorial image is therefore never an equivalence, it is not a visual support for the text but its point of reference, its stitching point, its perfect knot which does not need a rope and which cannot be undone.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, October 2016, trans. English Jean-Michel Déprats, Illustrations Aki Kuroda, 200 pages, €45
Writer(s): Aki Kuroda Edition: Gallimard
Available here.
Interview with Aki Kuroda: illustrating “Hamlet”, Editions Gallimard
Written by Marc Michiels (The Word and the Thing) on 02.01.17
“I really like nature… It’s not unnatural, culture is not unnatural.”
After A love from Swann decorated by Pierre Alechinsky, Gallimard editions give carte blanche to the Japanese artist Aki Kuroda, who has chosen to invest the universe in the words of William Shakespeare through images... a universe that he knows well. Le Mot & la Chose, through the voice of Marc Michiels, spoke privately with the artist Aki Kuroda, who tells us how to illustrate “his” Hamlet!
With regard to this edition in the Blanche collection, Giovanna Citi-Hebey and Anne Lagarrigue who run the collection present a magnificently produced work to collectors, art lovers, bibliophiles or quite simply to readers who love beautiful books.
“To be or not to be Hamlet”
To be or not to be, Aki Kuroda tells us, “is a phrase that lived through my childhood without me really knowing its context.” To use black or not to be white, to be white or not to use black, amounts for the artist to pose an invisible line calling into question the affair of men in their desires, in their memories, as if to reveal the lack of direction, of what he cannot distinguish in the night, his gaze veiled by two halos of light which observe him:
“He pushed me away with the whole length of his arm,
And with his other hand thus on his forehead,
He loses himself in scrutinizing my face
As if he wanted to draw it.
It remained that way for a long time.”
Should we then reject the bad part in order to live “purer with the other half”? This question no longer arises for Aki Kuroda, between nature, being and Cosmos, the man of the CosmoGarden performances has taken shape in the theater of this thing, as if to better dialogue with the consciousness of the king, of the spectacle of life, chimera of existences.
To observe his features, “the spirit that I saw is perhaps a devil, and the devil has the power to assume a seductive form; yes, and perhaps, taking advantage of my weakness and my melancholy… He abuses me to damn me.” But after all, isn't that the price to pay for an eternity of paper, ink, anchor moored to the Styx, color, lure to avoid the seven rings of damnation?
Preparing his revenge, Hamlet feigns madness, abandoning his fiancée Ophelia who loses her reason and drowns. Aki Kuroda's "Hamlet" is a fragile prince, with the double head of a Minotaur - Mad as the sea and the wind when they fight -, trembling, hesitating under the weight of life. Prisoner between the dark tower of his obligations and the inner breathing of love. Facing the mirror of washi paper, wet with the dew of the night and which has settled beyond time and space, towards a muddy death!
Aki Kuroda takes the reader into the darkness to better emerge through the journey of a rebirth, transformed towards another world, red, of the star of fire, blue, doubting the truth itself, but never his art - in counterfire – of a yellow color, mirror of creation, facing the mirror of words:
“O dear Ophélie, I am clumsy at rhyming,
I don't have the art of numbering my sighs.
But that I love you preciously,
O you most precious, believe it.
Farewell.
Yours forever,
very precious lady,
as long as this body is his.”
The portraits in this book are a material of thick, rich, generous color, filled with human terrors. Madly in love with the labyrinthine line of the void, connected, by the fullness of shadow, symbolic of black shapes. Forbidding tears of regret, like a living nature, in osmosis with an imaginary dialogue between man and artist, between thoughts of mourning and the very suffering of hell. This is the trace of an abandonment of his work to the work itself, that is to say an enrichment by grace of the intensity of the gesture accompanying the intensity of the word of the disgrace of men.
We must let men fulfill their own destiny, even through the wise withdrawal from the discovery of the sublime, in the know-how of beauty, in the balance of bodies, of the islands of the Cosmos. In this very beautiful book with more than fifty illustrations intended to touch the skin, to intersect the sight, to the memory of an era that does not want to die!
Born in 1944 in Kyoto into an art-minded family, Aki Kuroda's grandfather was a kimono maker in Kyoto and a patron of writers and artists. Raised in a family very open to European culture, Aki Kuroda began oil painting at the age of 4.
“I am the child, I did not copy”
His father, after having stayed in France before the Second World War, and before he became a professor of economics at the University of Doshisha, bought the magazine Le Minotaure and brought the copies to young Aki. There we found the creation of surrealist artists, but not only: Picasso, André Breton, Paul Eluard, André Masson, Man Ray, Miró, Dali, Magritte, Max Ernst, De Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Matisse, Brassaï, Man Ray, Tristan Tzara… It was the revelation of the young boy as the energy that consumed his entire life as an artist.
Underground reverie, a secret garden to remain the king of his pains of absence, in a world of assembly, in a world in tremor where the assembly of worlds will become the balance and movement of his life. A myth also which will reveal nothing less than true being, united with existence in its totality of which it is the expression of the sensitive. Allegory of a world in which the presence of the occupier and the upheaval of a Japan forced to reinvent itself are the beginnings of the deconstruction of confinement, of the construction through the very idea of performance, of creating a imaginary world which would have control over the reality of shadows. As if to spit out the darkness that would have stifled the life of a childhood, the life of a nation. As if to better free oneself from self-consciousness, to bring it to a peaceful sweetness which, irremediably, brings Aki Kuroda back to a previous state of total acceptance of his being, a metaphor for unhappy consciousness on the great immortal tree of the emperor, where it is good to live for oneself!
“My work is a bit like a woman's tights, with mesh, made of threads, information, very pretty, slightly sexy, erotic. I try to hole the material so that the hole becomes bigger, to see the reality of the flesh, like a little further, a place of poetry, of meeting, a space, a place of passage to go to the other side . Art is like an empty space somewhere, it exists like an energy, a movement. I am like the island of Japan in a dynamic position due to its tremors but also in balance to remain upright… It is not me who dominates everything. My Universe is the Cosmos! We live every day in a small Universe but we don't feel the pressure of the Cosmos behind it. I wanted to find a sort of no man's land by going to Europe. But we can never return to the past, to the origin, this is the reason why I created my universe, to live my existence, a kind of tower of Babel where I am the creator of my own destruction, of my own reconstruction calling for a balance, in a way the spirit of Doteki Eiko . My Minotaur often has only one face, is a little sad, a little lost to sublimate himself in the world of “Minosideral”, a star, a “Cosmogarden”, a star which ends up exploding and whose flesh falls to the earth, like in New York in Central Park becoming a kind of rock like that, a bit like an elephant skin like that, like the mountains that surround Kyoto. The Minotaur is in a way the force external to the earth which gives it its creative power, which attracts beings, the unique sons (which I am), travels further in the floating universe of the world... My work on the text of ' Hamlet was intended as a creation, not as simple illustrations, a shift, a colored noise, a collage, an assembly, then DIY, a somewhat raw process to become a living creation in opposition to modern life and our relationship to the world with the carelessness of high-tech on our freedom. In any case, we live, we are born and we die alone. This is undoubtedly the major idea which links me to the question of being or not to be. This is how Aki Kuroda expressed himself in his luminous words during our dazzling meeting in his workshop in November 2016.
Aki Kuroda tells us,
“I called William and we talked about it”!
then “if there is nothing mortal that can move them,
would have filled the burning eyes of heaven with milk and penetrated the gods with compassion.”
Only a testimony,
infinite wealth of the intelligence of the heart,
very structure of free souls.
Secret garden of two authors who, through the injunction of color,
black words, the black color even of words,
splash the living world with their contrast.
Portrayed as a new flowering of life,
of our sleeping eye by a sacred garden of culture,
“fallen by mistake on the heads of their authors.
From all this I can tell you the truth.”
The rest is silence,
distended human forms,
wandering under the mask of darkness.
But smiling at this delicious spectacle...
“To be is to destroy and create,
it's living and dying,
it’s being in the relationship of an energy…”
A CosmoCritique indeed!
Article written by Marc Michiels for Le Mot & la Chose
Hamlet, William Shakespeare, Gallimard, Coll. illustrations Aki Kuroda, trans. English Jean-Michel Déprats, 200 pages, €45. Available here.
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