by Caitlin Horrocks
Fifteen years ago, I wandered in to the first American exhibition of paintings by artist Oscar Oiwa. I used to walk periodically through the Arizona State University Art Museum in much the same way I liked to walk through the life sciences building with terrariums embedded in the walls showcasing native snake species: I was a graduate student in writing, and hungry for visual input of any kind that was not a computer screen or a printed page, the inside of a classroom, or the endless taupe streetscapes of Phoenix and Tempe.
By nearly any standard, but especially that low one, the Oiwa paintings were a windfall. They were oil on canvas and very large, spanning between one to six panels, each panel 90 inches tall by 45 inches wide. They were imagined landscapes, worlds that existed at surprising angles to our own, either parallel dimensions or possible futures. In “Flower Garden (Hiroshima)” the backdrop is a dense gray tangle of buildings, some upright, some hollowed out or collapsed. An enormous dark tree twists up out of the middle of the picture. Overlaying it all are dots and blossoms of luminescence, somehow both botanical and electrical, gathered so densely towards the top of the picture that the sky is blurred shades of yellow and pink. To say the sky is pink might suggest wildfires, or light pollution, or, given the painting’s title, violent destruction. But this is a glorious pink: I look at it and think of neon hydrangeas, not nuclear bombs.
Born in São Paulo, Brazil, to Japanese immigrant parents, Oiwa has travelled widely and lived in Tokyo, London, and New York City. During the pandemic, trapped in Long Island City, he embarked on a series of paintings called “If I were living in …” in which he imagined alternate art studios for himself, not just in space but time: 1910 Paris, 1925 Milan, 1956 São Paulo, and more. The landscapes of his paintings and drawings are often rooted in recognizable places, with exaggerations and distortions that can evoke both horror and wonder. He’s had a successful career, but you won’t find tote bags or posters of his work, maybe because these aren’t particularly comfortable images to have hanging on one’s walls.
That didn’t stop me from tacking up a page ripped from a small university promotional calendar, featuring a detail from Oiwa’s painting “Pooch,” in which a giant black dog somehow seems to stand both on and behind and inside another cityscape, the outlines of buildings embedded in its back. Its eyes are a blank staring white, but its fur looks soft. Its tail is up, its head curved and slightly lowered, as if curious about something it scents off to the left of the picture. If I could lean in to pet it, I honestly have no idea whether it would respond with a savage bite or grateful affection, but I think I would try.
A decade after I left Arizona I went to a solo show by the Chinese artist Liu Wei, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland. Casual curiosity had propelled me to Oiwa’s paintings, but this visit was very deliberate. I’d carved out time on a whirlwind trip specifically because the exhibit was titled Invisible Cities, and I love the book of the same name enough to go see nearly anything supposedly in conversation with it.
The 1972 novel by Italo Calvino unfolds in a series of sketches of imagined cities. Some bear close resemblance to our world, such as Tamara, so dense with signs and pictures (read: ads) that the real city underneath can’t quite be glimpsed. Others are more fantastical: the city of Isidore is the dream city of a young man, but can only be reached in old age.
The accumulation of playful, fake cities could grow tiresome or feel like intellectual gamesmanship in lesser hands, but Calvino’s book stays aloft through sheer depth of imagination, force of beauty, and the human longing hidden in its frame: all these vignettes are supposedly a series of audiences the explorer Marco Polo is having with the emperor Kublai Khan, in which the Khan asks for descriptions of every corner of his kingdom, finally growing suspicious that Marco Polo never speaks of Venice, his home. “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice,” Polo says, in William Weaver’s translation. The Khan is unimpressed by this approach, but Polo insists: “Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased. Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.” That the dizzying feats of imagination and language in the book are rooted by a deep sense of both home and loss, that an arrival is also always a departure, gives the book a beating heart.
The kinship between Liu Wei’s work and Calvino’s was, as it happened, in the curator’s head, not the artist’s; he’d never read the book until the curator suggested it to him, and although I admired the assemblages and sculptures—especially Library V-III, in which large, geometric forms were carved out of what first looked to me like white stone, then plaster, then turned out to be compressed book pages—they felt to me more self-contained than the expansive feel of Invisible Cities. I admired the work on its own terms, but left the museum wondering what visual art would echo for me Calvino’s intertwining of possible and impossible, its emotional vantage point of removed playfulness and piercing loneliness. I realized that I had in fact seen that exhibition, years earlier in Arizona, and that regardless of whether Oscar Oiwa had read a page of Calvino, the feeling those paintings evoked in me were the same as what I felt when I read the book.
Critics often describe Oiwa’s work as documenting the pressures and ills of globalization. Marilyn Zeitlin, who organized the Oiwa show at ASU, praised, “the complexity of his view of the transformations that have occurred as a result of unbridled human ambition. …His paintings have a lingering lyricism, suggesting that beauty persists in spite of what humankind has done to obliterate it.” For me, the impact of Oiwa’s work is not only that beauty persists “in spite of” humankind’s mutilations, but that humans are also capable of generating beauty, of persisting in our own ways inside and alongside the wreckage, perhaps of transforming it, both within the realities of the pictures, and by the fact of the pictures’ existence.
I haven’t seen his work in person since that original show: he’s exhibited steadily, but nowhere I could easily travel to; his work sells for amounts I could never afford. That exhibit has become its own lost city for me: no Instagram images will ever bring me back to that gallery, that moment, that person I was when I stumbled into it. It has become both a Venice and an Isidore: a point of departure I can’t return to, and a place I’ll never quite reach. Every time I describe an Oiwa painting, as Marco Polo would put it, I am saying something about its relationship to our real world, our Venices, but also to our imagined Tamaras and Isidores, and all the other cities in Calvino’s and Oiwa’s works that share a sensibility of mingled splendor and desolation.
One last example: Oiwa’s 2003 painting “Black Snow” shows a tidy village flecked with black dots and bisected by a river of fire. No people are visible, yet the village is not abandoned. Windows are lit, a few cars are in the streets; life goes on, even as the black snow falls. This could be a cozy place, if they could get that fire put out. Or maybe the people here have adapted to live alongside fire. Maybe if we could see their forms and faces, we would see how they’ve accommodated themselves, how they are and aren’t like us. Perhaps they make their own paintings, or books. Perhaps they build buildings with snakes in the walls.
Caitlin Horrocks is author of the story collections Life Among the Terranauts and This is Not Your City, both New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice titles. Her novel The Vexations was named one of the 10 best books of the year by the Wall Street Journal. She lives with her family in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
After the Art 