The Mysterious World of Rinpa Eshidan

By Mike Oakland |

You see a white board. Suddenly ghostly images of people radar-blip in front of you, appearing and disappearing here and there, every time leaving a mark, a line, a paint stroke on the board. Before you know it, something distinct and recognizable is created. A leaf, a lizard, beautiful lines and swirls. You're seeing a work of art in the making, somehow in fast forward. Just as you begin to take in the whole scene, appreciating it as you would any museum exhibit, one of those ghost blips appears again, only to splash a bucket of black paint on the wall, smearing all those shapes and images out of existance forever.

You've just witnessed Rinpa Eshidan at work, a crack team of professional art anarchists putting a new spin on the scene. Meet Noiz, Daisuke, D.H. Rosen, Akari, and Xola. They live somewhere between a finished piece that hangs lifeless on a wall, and the hours of planning before a work is actually created. They live in time-lapse bedlam, creating what is best described as Action Art, stroke after stroke, right before the eyes of an audience that watches captivated. One can almost feel the shockwave ripple through the onlookers as the work is quickly erased and the canvas painted anew.

Of course, Tokyo is a place that is known for its thriving alternative art culture. But relentlessly destroying your own work - sometimes before it's even finished? It's a novel idea, to say the least.

"Instead of focusing on the finished product, we believe the process of creation itself is where art comes to life," says the Rinpa website, so it's fitting that the team themselves have dubbed their style "art-in-process". Every performance and professional video the team does features members frantically painting, drawing and sculpting, sometimes in 2D, sometimes in 3 dimensions, expanding on each other's contributions to form something vivid, new and breathing.

"We never create something meant to last, as all of our work focuses on the process, not the finished product," says Rinpa member, and team ceramics specialist, D.H. Rosen. The team believes the process is something that anyone can take part in. "Sometimes we include our audience in that process as well, by asking them to pick up a brush and join us, or to help us erase/destroy what we just did so we can start over again."

So, in a world where sculptures of toilets and Pollack splotches are analyzed over hours, days, and sometimes entire careers, how did such a radical idea as art-in-process get off the ground?

"We all met at art school," says Rosen. "Noiz and Daisuke were already making process-art videos, and they wanted to incorporate sculptural work. I was already doing performance art with clay and it seemed like a really good match. So in October of 2006, we got together to film Room."

Room is the title of Rinpa's first 3D work, and one of their first YouTube videos, which was met with wild success. The video features a perfectly ordinary Japanese apartment transformed by wild, time-elapsed artists who paint, rearrange, and sculpt with abandon. With the release of Room and another, even more popular YouTube effort titled One Week of Artwork, the team encountered success and fame they weren't quite ready for.

"One Week of Artwork' was featured on the top page and had over a million hits in about 2 week's time," Rosen explains. "All of a sudden we were getting e-mails and offers for commercial work from all over the globe. We didn't even have a web page at the time, or even a sense of whether or not we were going to continue as a group beyond this one film."

But continue they did, although most of the artists all keep day jobs aside from Rinpa Eshidan. The crew gets together from time to time to do commercials for big names in Japan and abroad. They put on live performances frequently, and are poised for their first DVD release, en, very soon.

Tokyo, as always, is at the forefront of underground art. And it's hard not to notice the continuous melding of art and music. We've been seeing it a lot on the club scene, with live artists such as Shantell Martin accompanying a DJ, painting or sculpting to the music. Rinpa continues and in many ways perfects this trend. "The most collaboration work we have done is with the musicians we work with," says Rosen. "The music is such a big part of what we do, and none of the guys in our crew are musicians, so we've had to go outside the group to get our sound and that has led to some really great art/ music collaborations."

If this is the first you've heard about Rinpa Eshidan, now's the time to take the leap. Start by checking out their YouTube videos, then grab your tickets for their new performance series taking place at Art Complex in Shinjuku from April 23rd through May 3. Most days you can check out a multimedia exhibit of what the crew has put together so far, but April 19th Rinpa will be there live to commemorate the en DVD launch and put on what is sure to be an impressive show.

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