Mirei Shigemori
Shigemori was born in Kayō, Jōbō District, Okayama Prefecture, and in his youth was exposed to lessons in traditional tea ceremony and flower arrangement, as well as landscape ink and wash painting.
In 1917, he entered the Tokyo Fine Arts School to study nihonga, or Japanese painting, and later completed a graduate degree from the Department of Research.
[1]: 192 He also intended to create a new style of ikebana, or flower arrangement, and produced art criticism and history writings, including the Complete Works of Japanese Flower Arrangement Art published in 1930, and the New Ikebana Declaration written with Sofu Teshigahara and Bunpo Nakayama in 1933.
Kendall Brown, in his preface to Mirei Shigemori: Rebel in the Garden notes that “Shigemori embodies the central artistic quest of his era – a new direction in Japanese creativity founded on the desire to overcome a fundamental tension between the perceived polarities of dynamic Western Culture and the relative stasis attributed to the Asian tradition.”[1]: 15 He was trained in nihonga, or Japanese painting, and drew on the traditional arts of ikebana (flower arrangement), and chadō (tea ceremony), and Shinto, Buddhist, and Taoist cosmological ideas in his work.
He advocated for studying the past masters, and that designers should “emulate their way to invention rather than the results achieved, (so) gardenmakers could distill the most valuable inspiration for their work.”[2]: 116 Shigemori’s work reflects this idea of culturally grounded innovation.
At the age of 29, Shigemori changed his first name from Kazuo to Mirei the Japanese pronunciation for Francois Millet, a French landscape painter.
His new style attempted to mimic the surrealist movements found in western cultures at the time while still rooted in Japanese aesthetics.
Shigemori believed that Japanese garden design had stopped evolving since the Edo Period (1600-1868), and resolved to modernize the medium.
His philosophical approach to Japanese garden design reinterpreted foreign influences to breathe new vitality to a traditional medium.
Traditional garden forms are reinterpreted with modern materials and attempt to reengage the viewer with the ever developing continuum of Japanese culture.
