Takako Azami is much taken with the attractiveness of leaves and foliage, and has spent years capturing the elemental qualities of pines, bamboo, plum and maple trees. Born in 1964 in Japan, Azami has consistently concentrated on the rendering of trees, whose vegetation she turns into concentrated beauty in sumi ink paintings (there are a dozen large- and mid-size works in the show). Interestingly enough, the works, dense with rounded blotches of ink, also can be seen as abstractions, although it is clear over time that Azami’s imagery derives from genuine scenery in nature.  As curator and professor Midori Yashimoto points out in her short, insightful catalogue essay, the effects of Azumi’s paintings find correlations in Western artists such as Mondrian and Agnes Martin, whose grids generated art of remarkable beauty. In the same way, Azumi’s idiom of dots and lines shows us how a painter may work out an intuitive system of visual accomplishment, enabling her audience to appreciate the organic structure provided by nature.

Indeed, the most compelling detail of Azami’s art is its openness to other traditions. Recently the artist has spent time in residencies in New York and Vermont, whose influence has been general rather than specific. But it is true that overall her painting is approaching a conscious combination of natural specificity and abstract idealism—qualities that reveal an appreciation on the artist’s part of achievements and legacies not necessarily belonging to her own culture.  The endless assertion of Western art’s influence on contemporary Asian art, which seems a bit tired now, is truly enlivened by a double reading of Azami’s ink painting.  It is easy to read her work as belonging to the great Japanese tradition of suibokuga (ink painting), but it is also true that the pieces easily take their place within transcultural vocabularies that owe their energy and effectiveness to the development of Western abstraction. Azami’s paintings show us that eclecticism continues to work as an esthetic, especially at a time when there is so much intermixing of culture.

Azami’s technique is unusual: working in her studio north of Tokyo, she uses ink to draw dots, small and large, and lines on the back of absorbent hemp paper. She allows the ink to partially bleed through to the front of the other side of the hemp paper, building a vocabularly thick with rounded splotches that mimic the form of a trees’ leaves. The effects of the ink forms are remarkable, bringing both anarchic energy and formal balance to compositions that are notable for their technical skill and rough fidelity to nature. In a practice that recalls the allover compositions of abstract expressionism, Azami refuses to focus on the particulars of perspective and so energizes the entire field of her subject. Viewers can see this put to spectacular effect in the 4 by 6 foot work entitled Pine Trees (2008), in which dots of ink, some as big as a clenched hand, crash and collide, suggesting the texture of trees in wind and light. Some of the dots are gray, while others are deep black; Azami regularly makes rows of dots connected by thin lines.

It is a pleasure to experience Azami’s art, which is descriptive rather than conceptual. In New York’s art culture, intellectualism has taken over the field, but there is room for other, more phenomenological art as well.  Bamboo 8 (2006), more distinctly Japanese in its affiliations, is vertically hung like a scroll. Consisting of dots that hang from long stripes—the work is 63 by 19 inches—Bamboo 8 feels highly traditional. The sharp, narrow bamboo leaves are outlined in negative space, which is slightly yellow in hue.  Seeing the bamboo foliage cascade downward, one has the sense that the artist is at one with her subject matter. One of the most interesting aspects is Azami’s negative capability: her technique demonstrates a willingness to expunge the self in favor of a poetic exactitude of description. This makes her art not only visually compelling but also spiritually charged.

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BORN IN OKINAWA AND RAISED IN TOKYO, Shigeno Ichimura has lived and worked in New York since 1989. His small, delicate abstract canvases opened M.Y. Art Prospects’ inaugural show in its new space in Chelsea. Over-sized variants of the same work hung simultaneously in the lobby of Tower 49, a corporate high-rise spanning the block from 48th to 49th Street off Madison.

How very different the work looks in the two places! M.Y. Art Prospects, typical of many in Chelsea, is a room-sized gallery, not a monumental corporate sanctum. The space is suited to the intimate size of Ichimura’s smaller canvases. Scaled down canvases stay true to the character of the sensibility on display. By contrast, Tower 49 is a hollow corridor bereft of everything but height. Here, the work huffs and puffs to assert itself, contradicting the calm that makes it so appealing in miniature.

Ichimura’s series, entitled “Moment,” offers an art in which nothing happens. It does not have to. The moment-seen, seized and entered-is enough. Fragile washes of iron oxide breathe over one another. No brush work is visible. There are only subtle shifts of liquid movement, as of mists rising and descending. Surfaces seem stirred by air. There is no imagery to speak of. We see into a void, silent and still. For those with the temperament for it, his painting suggests the Buddhist Emptiness, a void of inexhaustible contents. Placid and nearly monochrome, it prompts reflection, a response that is only possible at close viewing in a conducive setting.

My companion at the gallery resisted: “It just looks like a slice of rusted metal.” Yes and no. Ichimura captures the appearance of rust with veils of red-brown pigment, flecked with black or tinged with siennas that range from orange to gold. Separated from any recognizable object, the associations we have with oxidation-dissolution and its escort, mortality-give way to something else. Suggestions of renovation emerge. Disintegration, testimony to impermanence, is part of the unending process of becoming. Corrosion touches and transforms all things of earth. William Blake would have had no difficulty seeing the world in each particle of rust.

At Tower 49, the prerogatives of a corporate hall overwhelm the delicacy of Ichimura’s touch. Grace is lost. What is left on these over-sized canvases, made to order for the space, are the pretensions of Abstract Expressionism with none of its vigor. The strain of maintaining a gossamer touch over so much acreage begins to show. Things look less like calls to meditation and more like . . well, mixed media. Nine paintings, swollen to 8 feet and hung high overhead, are as compelling as acoustic panels. And as unbeheld. Three thousand people a day shuttle through this space without looking up. Only if the elevators are stalled can they take Ichimura’s suggestion to “stop and contemplate for a moment.”

Contemplate what? A secular age drains contemplation of its life’s blood. The de-sacralizing of meditation in contemporary culture turns work like Ichimura’s into a soothing backdrop to something else, hygienic and decorative. Divorced from its spiritual and religious ends- contemplation-like yoga and sand-painting- it is enlisted to serve utilitarian intentions. Staying young, losing weight and relieving stress are among the profane benefits of a state of prayer. In the arts, the theatre of one’s own “creativity” cancels any plunge into the ego-denying emptiness of Absolute Tao.

This leaves Ichimura, an ambitious modern, in confusion over the purposes of the action he invites us to perform. “One of the central themes of my projects is the process of giving physical existence to my work. I am interested in letting my artwork exist as physical material along with its surface image.” And what might his work be, distinct from its physical existence? This is boiled rice pudding, cooked to feed the notion that an artist’s concept takes precedent over the work of his hands. Floating in the mush is the essential conceit of conceptual art: maybe you’ll get something to look at; maybe you won’t. What of it? After all that cranking and winding in the studio, the only thing that counts is the artist’s own mental event.

Scrapping artists’ statements is usually a sensible move. It would be good if Ichimura ignored his own and took to the Zen and Shin masters or John of the Cross. Through them, he might gain a deeper regard for the quiescence at the heart of his own painting.

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