Article by Cynthia Barber

Tamarind Institute Journal 2003

 

Yoshimi Hayashi and the Language of Process

In the video Ebb and Flow,  (photo) artist Yoshimi Hayashi, working at the ocean, is drawing letters in the wet sand in a perfectly straight line down to and into the water. He then walks back up the beach and starts another row of letters exactly parallel to the previous row. The surf is powerful and insinuates itself farther into his writing with each wave. Like the ocean itself, the man works rhythmically and unhurriedly, making his perfectly parallel rows of writing even as the water eradicates more of them. The pattern of his words in the sand leaves a striking design, quietly elegant. The rolling surf, golden in the sunset, is powerful, insistent. No people are in sight. There is only the one man making his beautiful marks on a beach that will soon be engulfed in the high tide.

 

Much of the artistry, philosophy and humanity of Yoshimi Hayashi is perfectly exemplified in this video. One is reminded of Sisyphus, refusing to be dissuaded from his labors despite the repeated need to start them over again from the beginning. What Camus described as the "absurdity" of Sisyphus' position ( the indifference of the universe to man's efforts) was also the source of his humanity. Sisyphus might also have been a follower of the Tao in his acceptance of the amorphous nature of existence as the key to life.

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Raised in both a traditional Japanese environment in Tokyo, and then in the ultra hip world of California, Yoshimi sees his two worlds as representing the need to balance process and product. Doing artwork in his California high school was only a question of a finished product. When he went back to Japan to study ceramics, he was told he needed to start all over - to chop the wood for the kiln, to clean the bricks -to understand his environment before being allowed to even touch the clay. The diligence that came from that process, and the need to destroy everything he made at the end of each day and start again the next morning, gave him a new understanding of making art. Identifying with the materials and the beauty of each step of the process reinforced Buddhist precepts from his family life. From that training came his belief that the humble, daily, mundane act is part of a  greater pattern, and that his art should show the relationship between the two.

 

As Yoshimi says, his Japanese background has provided him with his modus operandi Using time-based materials has been a way for Hayashi to contrast the process and the product. His earliest pieces were calligraphic writings on cocktail napkins. Like the sand writings, the beauty of the handwritten words was subject to destruction because of the fragility of the material. Likewise, in several patterns of written words he made on chalk boards, the gestures involved in the process and the hypnotic over-all designs they made were not intended to last very long..

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