Perhaps it was
inevitable that they be together - two people, born in the East,
strongly influenced by the West, raised and trained on opposite sides of
the Pacific, who found their essence, and each other, in a mutual
obsession with art.
 Susumu Sakaguchi’s mother was Nisei, second generation
American-Japanese, born in Greeley, Colorado. As a child, her
grandfather took her to Japan for her education, where they got caught
in the middle of a war. She married there, but by 1956, with Japan still
in poor condition, she brought her family to the United States. Susumu
was twelve and already showing talent as a painter. He entered Otis
Institute of Arts in Los Angeles at age 14.
 Shizuno
Nasu suffered a terrible burn on her left arm when she was three. She
still bears the scars. As part of her rehabilitation, she was sent by
her parents, at that tender age, to learn ballet. At seven, she was
selected to study with The Bolshoi, who sent a Russian teacher to Japan
to give classes to invitees. Under his tutelage, she knew she’d be a
dancer for life.
Susumu earned his Master’s degree at the California Institute of Art,
taught by video artist Nam Jun Paik; conceptual artist John Baldessari;
performance artist Allen Kaprow,; and “my personal mentor,” Mariam
Shapiro, “a leading feminist who started the movement with Judy Chicago
and Kate Millet.” He moved to New York City in 1973 and was assistant to
Isamu Noguchi from 1977 to 1988. Noguchi was 74 and he was 34 when they
began their long association.
Shizuno, meanwhile, entered Osaka Institute of Art, studying ballet,
tap, jazz, “so many Western techniques.” After graduation, she opened
her first, tiny, dance studio with seven students. By age 35, she had
three studios and 100 students, but no time to explore her personal
questions, “Why dance?” and “Dance where?”
She closed her studios, and with her small
daughter, moved to a remote village “almost a ghost-town” in the
mountains of Niigata, Northern Japan, renting a three hundred year old
house with a floor so rickety she had to repair it herself before it was
fit to dance on. To buy groceries she walked 6 miles, there and back.
And she danced, alone, on a rigid schedule she set for herself, every
day, through the stifling heat of summer and the deep snows of winter,
creating and re-creating her art.
Susumu
had his own self-imposed schedule, painting every day. “Splashing
paint,” he says, “I come to the same place Shizuno talks about, ‘No
mind.” From 1972 onward, he showed his paintings in galleries and
museums all over the United States and Japan. His resume reads: New
York, New York, Tokyo, Tokyo, Philadelphia, Hiroshima, Nagoya, Jersey
City.
His work was equally influenced by nature and what is man-made. In New
York, “concept” was the main story, but for him, it couldn't be
everything. “My
knowledge is American, but my sensibility is still Japanese. It looks
like I cannot change,” he laughs.
Shizuno wanted to go to Bali, but instead an opportunity came to dance
in Paris. “Paree? Not Bali? The gods misunderstood!,” she complains.
In France she performed at the Japanese Embassy and UNESCO Hall,
exhibiting her self-created, very personal dance form. But the art
director told her, “Your dance is not unique. Your spirit is Japanese
but your techniques are all Western. Your body isn’t expressing what you
want it to. I’d like to see you dance what can only be danced by someone
Japanese.”
In those years, Susumu, as Isamu Noguchi’s assistant, was attending the
glittering major museum shows of his elderly employer and friend,
meeting other legends of American art, also very elderly: Louise
Nevelson in her nineties, Georgia O’Keefe in her eighties.
At a Noguchi retrospective at the Whitney Museum, he met the diminutive,
still beautiful, pioneer of modem dance, Martha Graham, who arrived in a
full length mink coat which grazed the floor. “She was like a fantasy.
Magatama!” he says, using a Japanese word which describes a jewel, a
symbol of the source of life.
Shizuno Nasu had never studied Japanese dance. The form she now decided
to explore was never danced by a woman. This was the primitive,
mythological, story-telling dance of the Shinto priests, known as “kagura.”
She travelled, with her small daughter, to one of the oldest Shinto
shrines, Takachiho Temple, near Aso Volcano and volunteered to clean up.
When someone finally asked,
“What are you doing here, always cleaning?” she revealed that she wanted
to study the secret, sacred dance. The head priest of the temple taught
her how to study: not to ask for anything, just to dance with devotion.
Thus prepared, he took her to a teacher who would introduce her to the
mysteries of kagura. After her training in this exacting form of dance,
she practiced her art in Shinto and Buddhist temples throughout Japan
for eight years. Arriving invited or uninvited, her child in tow, she
danced with pure devotion.
“Sometimes they gave you a little food,” she says.
Susumu Sakaguchi was coming into his own as a painter. Exhibition
followed exhibition. One was a group show at the Fukuyama City Museum in
Hiroshima, featuring twelve New York artists. Shizuno attended
the exhibition and left a note for Susumu, saying that, of all the work,
only his paintings spoke to her. “I had to stop and listen,” she wrote,
and, “I’d like to see more of your art.” Her letter, left at the museum,
ended up in his jacket pocket. He didn’t have time to read it
immediately, then forgot it was there.
Six months later, at a solo show in Okayama, Japan, he wore the same
jacket, put his hand in his pocket, and found her note. The gallery
manager contacted Shizuno, who just happened to live nearby. She came to
the gallery and was introduced to Susumu.
In Okayama, Susumu hung a six foot by twenty-four foot painting. Shizuno,
who was starring in a half-hour television special, asked if she could
shoot at the gallery, and “dance with your painting.” He agreed.
During the next few months, he began to go and see her perform. When his
gallery gave him a studio to work in for the summer in Ushimado, a
beautiful fishing village two hours from Shizuno’s house, she and her
daughter spent time with him there “just enjoying.” Before returning to
New York, he invited them both to follow him. He gave them two one way
tickets.
In 1997, Susumu and Shizuno were married at the gallery where they first
met in Okayama. He had an exhibition, she danced, and they said “I do,”
in front of another of his twenty-four foot paintings.
Since then, they’ve lived a tri-coastal existence, commuting between New
York, Japan and the Big Island of Hawaii, exhibiting their art
internationally. In downtown Manhatten, his 3,000 square foot studio is
a 15 minute walk away from 9/11’s ground zero. There, their environment,
though obviously fragile, is completely man-made. Here in Hawaii,
they’re surrounded by nature and live on an active volcano.
“In Hawaii, nature gives you a guide to a different way to live,” Susumu
says, “not so conceptual. You really feel that nature is most important
and that, here, you can find a balance.”
In the near future, Susumu Sakaguchi and Shizuno Nasu will base
themselves permanently in Hawaii. He’ll still be painting every possible
moment of every day. She’ll still be dancing to the music of a stone
flute or a jazz saxaphone, in front of an audience, or alone, in full
costume, with the wind for accompaniment, on Kilauea volcano. They may
alter their style of living but they’ll never change their mutual
support of each others’ work. They’ll never change their romance with
art.
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