Story
The Autumn He Was Seventeen
It all began in the autumn of his seventeenth year. Without that encounter, the Nihonga painter Hiromitsu Kato would never have existed.
He had loved to draw since he was small. A black line runs across a sheet of white paper, and a world is built. Animals that could not exist, plants of impossible shape — on paper they were unmistakably real. There was freedom there.
One day his mother told him to go to kindergarten, and he refused outright. He would not be able to draw, he protested, until his mother lost patience: “If you won't go to kindergarten, I'll shut you in the storehouse.” In those days an old earthen storehouse stood in the garden of the Kato house. But he was not like other children. He took up paper and a pencil and walked into the storehouse himself. He did not come out until the sun went down.
From the moment he decided to be a painter he set his sights on an art university in Tokyo, but he could not settle on a department. The only technique he knew then was oil painting. Three months before the entrance examinations, in a department store in Sendai, he came face to face with Nihonga. Looking at it, he wept. He wept openly, in front of everyone. At seventeen he had found at last the technique fit for the world he carried inside him.
After three years of failed entrance examinations he entered Tama Art University, and there, as an undergraduate and then a graduate student, he learned the techniques of Nihonga to their foundations. Lines drawn in ink; ground shell and crushed semi-precious stone bound to washi with animal collagen to give color. The materials were expensive, so he cut back on food to buy them. The year he finished graduate school he stood 180 centimeters tall and weighed barely 55 kilograms.
After graduate school he began to show in Japan's major exhibitions and to take prizes. But that recognition stopped at the country's borders. His goal was to become one of the great masters of the world, and the way there, as he saw it, ran through the Gagosian Gallery in New York. How could a man with no connections and no money be recognized abroad? Troubled but resolved, he left the Japanese art establishment behind and set out to feel his way forward alone.
In 2009, for a group exhibition held in Spain, he set foot on Spanish soil for the first time. A critic he met there praised him before the local press and gave him one piece of advice: “If you want to go out into the world, you must paint a great many large works. Enough to fill Gagosian's gallery, which is as vast as a concert hall.” And then he said: “I will be waiting for the day you come back to Spain with those major works.”
In 2011 he reached new ground in his painting. It was nothing like the line-based work that had come before: cherry trees built from countless petals. As advised, he quickened his pace to increase the number of works, raising his solo exhibitions from one a year to two, driving himself, producing without pause.
And in 2019 he landed in Spain once more. As promised, and with major works in hand — a great many of them. “It took me ten years, but I have finally kept my promise,” he said with a smile to the local press. The solo exhibition at the Hispano-Japanese Cultural Center of the University of Salamanca closed to great acclaim.
Spring came. In Tokyo the cherry trees were already in full bloom, though around his studio in the hills of Saitama they had not yet reached their peak. After a short rest he took up his brushes again. A solo exhibition at a museum in Yokohama had been set for the following March. That night he said to his wife: “I have enough now.” He was telling the person who understood him best, who had spent more than half his life at his side, that he had made enough work to fill the walls of Gagosian.
Two days later, Hiromitsu Kato died. He was 62. By a strange chance, it was his wife's birthday. Everyone said it was too soon, that his time was only beginning. Yet he had passed on everything that mattered and left it behind: those words — “I have enough now” — and the works themselves. The baton has been handed on. The dream of the boy who once wept before a Nihonga painting rests now in the hands of those he left.