Shigeru Taniguchi

Blooming Offstage

undated

Taniguchi was born in Fukuoka in 1948. After finishing high school, he left the southern island of Kyushu and relocated to metropolitan Tokyo. He pursued art part-time while illustrating books and working at a commercial printing company. Unlike many contemporary Japanese artists, who deliberately choose and then refine one specific theme throughout their career, Taniguchi’s themes varied widely, based on whatever he was interested in at the time. This led to works of stunning imagination and creativity -- from a series on Noh, to prints inspired by his idols Man Ray and Jasper Johns, to several prints around the theme of brushes. Each new edition of his prints was a huge success with our customers and his silkscreens were accepted by a myriad of international biennales, at several of which he was awarded the top prize. Everything was grist for his creative mill, and it was always an exciting time when Taniguchi-san came to show us a new silkscreen edition. My family members often recognized items from our home that we had planned on discarding but that he found exciting – customs forms, luggage labels, discarded tags, stamps, newspapers, photographs – all were incorporated into his work. Revisiting his prints today often feels as though I am viewing a unique family memory album especially those that feature family photos or images of the first Tolman Collection of Tokyo location. In 2005, a fire destroyed the artist’s home and studio which resulted in a series of strong black and white paintings and then nothing. Taniguchi-san went to work at 7-Eleven to pay the bills while waiting for creative inspiration. At the end of 2008, he disappeared. The Tolman Collection of Tokyo was listed as his next of kin, so we were notified, and the Tokyo gallery had the arduous and depressing task of disposing of everything in Taniguchi’s home. No one has heard from him since, and no body has ever been found. Had this been an artist who I did not know, I might tell this anecdotally, as a sad cautionary tale of how artists need to learn to balance pure artistic vision with the worldliness needed to do business in the "real" world but, since Taniguchi-san was a beloved intrinsic part of my childhood, his unresolved and unnecessary end remains, to this day, profoundly saddening. Taniguchi-san was a lovely, sweet man, quiet in person and witty through his art. Fiercely independent and creative, he was extremely talented as evinced by the range of his themes. He was an enigma: a seemingly simple man with a very sophisticated view of the world, at least as expressed through his stunning art.