Deeply drawn to Japanese sensibility, Sylvie Buisson first studied Japanese Art and Japanese culture during her Plastic Arts and Art History studies in Paris. However, nothing compared to staying in Japan, in Tokyo, Kyoto of course, and throughout all its provinces. This became possible through the training internships of her aikido-ka and kendo-ka husband, starting in 1975. The discovery of Japan reinforced their feeling of affinity with this country. They first embarked on creating a work about Japanese temples and sanctuaries: no book in French existed on the subject. They published articles on Japan in French journals, illustrating them with their photographs. Then, gradually, they began to focus on Foujita, around 1980. Japan is thus a love story they spontaneously developed during their Beaux-Arts and university studies, which was confirmed by the Japanese reality, its arts, its craftsmanship, and its natural, traditional, and innovative ways of life.
Foujita then became the perfect excuse to fuel this passion, and the driving force behind an infinite and ongoing research.
Like his native country, this unique artist knew how to combine opposing forces throughout his life, or at least opposites—that is, innovation and tradition—in the same way he blended East and West, great joys and terrible misfortunes. He exorcised both, and by taming them, transformed them into magical works.
Traditional or modern, Japan remains above all itself, meaning it is as true in tradition—and its experience, still perpetuated today in the rules of art—as it is in the most innovative, extravagant, surprising modernity, often at the forefront of the global avant-garde. And this is what always fascinates Sylvie Buisson; the Japanese apply the same care to inventing and performing new modern elements (art, fashion, technology…) as they do to following ancestral ways of life and customs—which they absolutely do not wish and cannot do without. It is a beautiful example she would like to transpose to Europe, and France in particular. A model of balance pushed to the extreme—fully embraced.
Traveling to Japan was essential for Sylvie Buisson, not only as a necessity that allowed her to meet members of the Fujita family and his friends, the last witnesses of his life, and to admire his works present in various homes, but also as an initiatory, philosophical, and human journey.
By retracing Foujita’s steps, traveling thousands of kilometers across Japan, from his birthplace—now a large garage not far from the river—to the often-destroyed sites of his various residences, the artist took on an extremely tangible form in her eyes, and his work with him. Visiting the place where Madeleine died in the spring of 1936, at the site of the Mexican-style house of which only the gate pillars remain intact—the rest burned in the 1945 bombing of Tokyo—was a moment of grace; accompanied by Nobuko Fujita, evoking her wondrous memory of Madeleine, the expert became aware of the existential difficulties Foujita had overcome to avoid succumbing to despair or madness… And of his great strength of spirit.
Curating exhibitions of his works in Japan and publishing the Catalogue Raisonné of his work led to new journeys and stays, always as enriching.
The Artistic Archives
