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Amami, Amami! Nguyen Dinh Dang
The first time I heard about the Amami Great Island was 17 years ago, when I started working at the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) in Saitama, Japan. Here I met Michio Seki-san, who was then the RIKEN executive councilor.
Seki-san is a native of the subtropical Amami Great Island. From him I learned that the Amami islands, stretching 250 miles south of Japanese mainland, have an independent culture that is quite distinctive from the stereotype image of a seemingly Japanese monoculture. One day in 1995 Seki-san took me to the atelier of Hatake-san, an Amami native. Hatake-san was the first Japanese artist I ever met.
During a vacation to his native land, Hatake-san sent me a box full of shells he collected on the Amami beach. This inspired me to create my first painting on the Amami theme, entitled “The Giant Shells from the Amami Islands” although I had never visited the islands. This painting was displayed at my first solo show in Japan in 2001. Seki-san visited the show, and later purchased this painting. This was the beginning of my long lasting friendship with Seki-san and Hatake-san.
My first visit to the Amami eventually took place last May when my wife and I attended the closing of the group exhibition of paintings by 11 artists including myself, who are members of the Shutai Art Association, at the Tanaka Isson Museum. Our visit was only three days and ended just before a big typhoon landed on the islands. The weather before the typhoon was humid, with a cloudy gray sky and a light monsoon. But this did not prevent the hospitality of Amami people to touch the bottom of my soul. My wife and I were taken around for sightseeing. We met with cheerful and sincere people, whose hospitality and modesty have deeply impressed us.
In the last evening Hatake-san, my wife and I were invited to a farewell dinner hosted by our Amami friends at Gintei – a Japanese tavern in Naze (Amami city), the capital of the Amami Great Island. The dinner included a shimauta performance by Mrs. Matsuyama, the tavern’s owner, who is also a famous singer of Amami folksongs (shimauta), and her 15 year-old granddaughter Marina-chan. Delicious Japanese foods, the Amami folkdance, and shimauta sung in a high pitched voice by the teenage girl in a hip-hop fashion, accompanied by her grandmother, wearing a tsumugi kimono, made the farewell party the climax of our trip. Listening to the shimauta, I started to figure out an idea of my new painting on the Amami Islands. As I had seen plenty of works by Tanaka Isson on the theme of the exotic Amami landscape, displayed at the museum that bears his name, where we had the group exhibition, I imagined that my painting should have a different thought, feeling, and of course, style and techniques of mine. Anyhow, I knew for sure that dominating the composition should be a figure of Marina-chan.
Back in Tokyo, I asked Seki-san’s sister, Akiko-san, who is "the Amami cultural information center" in Tokyo, to contact Marina-chan’s parents for their consent of putting an image of their daughter in my painting. Giving me an “OK”, they also let me know that Marina-chan would attend a competition of all Japan folksongs in Tokyo in the late of August. Akiko-san and I came to the final concert, where we met Marina-chan and her grandmother, Matsuyama-san. The first good news of the competition was that both Marina-chan and another Amami girl, who is also the pupil of her grandmother, won prizes. So I was not the only person, who took Marina-chan pictures in the foyer. A number of reporters and cameramen joined me to shoot photos of the girls as well.
I started the composition last November. In the painting I put a landscape of Maiori – a town at the Amalfi coast in the south of Italy. On the front wall of the landscape I drew a silhouette seen from the back of Marina-chan, wearing a tsumugi kimono, the same one she had on her at the last all Japan folksong contest in Tokyo. However, the part below her shoulder gradually transforms into a kind of hole-window on the wall, showing the Amami landscape with a hala tree in the front plan and a stormy Amami beach before the typhoon in the background. I also put two symbols of Amami, a ruddy kingfisher (akashyobin), which seems to escape through the hole-window from the Amami world into the Mediterranean one, and a moon lily (datura), one of many subtropical flowers representing Amami, which seems to have fallen on the Neapolitan soil.
For me the Amalfi coast and Amami Great Island have some common features. They both represent the cultures and traditions, which are quite different from the dominating ones from the Northern Europe in the Italian case and Japanese mainland in the Japanese one. The landscapes are both exotic, with long sand beaches diffused into a sapphire sea under a manganese sky. At the same time, they are diametrically opposed to each other, starting from the Neapolitan songs, and tarantella on the Amalfi coast from one side, shimauta and odori on the Amami islands from the other side, and ending with pasta, cheese and red wine in Neapolitan coast, keihan, sashimi, and shochyu in Amami.
The painting was inspired by the gracious Amami teenage girl, the splendid sceneries of the Amalfi coast and Amami Great Island, and beautiful Neapolitan songs and shimauta. Music fills the painting from the crescendo in the major scales in the front plan to the diminuendo in minor scales in the backgrounds. The Amami landscape behind the hole-window in the silhouette of the girl goes contrapuntally with the Neapolitan landscape. Both of them are individually beautiful songs that sound as a harmonically polyphonic whole when sung together. Neapolitans must have been quite musically inspired when building the stone stairs in the street with seven steps as a heptatonic scale, or the white piano keys, each of which has five rear stones as a pentatonic scale, or the black piano keys, I supposed.
As for the title of the painting, I found amusing to put it as “Amami, Amami!”, where the first “Amami” means “Love me” in Italian, whereas the second “Amami” (奄美) is the name of the native land of my friends, where for the first time I was enjoying beautiful shimauta performed by a 15-year old girl.
Nguyen Dinh Dang, “Amami, Amami!”, 2012, oil on canvas, 60.6 x 72.7 cm (click on the painting to see the larger image at the original webpage) Tokyo, 8/1/2012
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