Ghost Plan No.1

Born in Osaka in 1940, Keiji Usami was an artist representing the Japanese contemporary art scene. Usami began to teach himself painting. Usami held his first solo show at Minami Gallery (Tokyo) in 1982. and he started systematic creation of paintings by employing four human figures taken from a news photograph of the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles, circles and gradation. In 1966, Usami’s work was exhibited in The New Japanese Paintings and Sculpture at MoMA in NY. In 1968, Usami unveiled LASER=BEAM=JOINT, the first work in Japan using laser beam. His work from the same series exhibited in Japan World Exposition, Osaka 1970 received attention. Usami continued producing his works both in Japan and abroad, including those exhibited at the Venice Biennale 1972. The four symbolized human figures, which Usami repeatedly used and transformed, became his lifelong motif to compose paintings as “thinking space” for people of the same era and their world experience. Usami wrote a number of books and practiced his art theory described in the books in creating paintings.

Four symbolized human figures, running man, pausing man, crouching man, and hurling man, originating from a news photograph of the Watts riot are drawn on the flat matière with no brush touches. Usami said, “Creating a system to replace ‘homogenous space and its scenographic expressions’ by the network of symbol relation was the answer to the question coming closer after the silence of space reduction. I named it ‘ghost plan.’”