Death in Black Trunks: Yuki Ishikawa and Transience in Asian Art.
Thoughts arise endlessly,
There’s a span to every life.
One hundred years, thirty-six thousand days:
The spring through, the butterfly dreams.
—Daichi (1290–1366)
All cultures struggle with death and use art to embody and understand these fears. By engaging with representations of the end of life we better understand the temporary, fragile, and enduring value of being mortal.
Japanese shoot-style professional wrestler Yuki Ishikawa is an excellent vehicle for exploring ideas about life’s impermanence, rebirth and making connections with other artistic media exploring these themes. An annihilative force in the ring, Ishikawa’s matches have metaphors and symbols that link them to Asian art about mortality and death, works both historic and contemporary.
This article was inspired by my watching matches while browsing through an issue of the magazine Ars Orientalis. Author, critic and historian Melia Belli was inspired “to bring multiple examples of the Asian arts of death into dialogue with each other. Universally, the arts of death raise questions about their intended audience that are particular to this category of art. Death art may be just as much for the benefit of the living as the deceased.” (1)
In a similar fashion I wanted to cast one of the scariest performers I’ve ever seen, Yui Ishikawa, as the figure of death to explore themes of transience, impermanence and mortality in the context of some Asian art (primarily Japanese, but some Chinese and Cambodian pieces as well) that I found beautiful, illustrative, and evocative.
“All things are born and die over and over again. The cycle of rebirth can be escaped only by eliminating all desire and thus attaining nirvana or enlightenment, the only stable, non-transient state. Such an attitude can also show us how to understand [these selected art pieces] and it also makes it possible to find beauty in its vanishing and to accept the fact that the impermanence and evanescence of everything make everything even more beautiful,” Maja Milcinski writes in her fascinating paper, “Permanence and Death in Sino-Japanese Philosophical Context.” (2) These fundamentally Buddhist tenants have informed Asian art generally, and Japanese art specifically, since the dawn of the religion.
“At various stages of Japanese history it was felt necessary to educate people in confronting the inevitability of corporeal death,” Milcinski says. (3) For purposes of this article we’ll be focusing on works from four times; a Chinese religious text from the Seventh Century, a poem from Japan in the Twelfth Century, a woodblock print from the Japanese “Edo Period” of 1600-1868, and some contemporary pieces by Tomoyo Ihaya.
Japanese representations of death, decay, and mortality are similar to their counterparts in the west but, according to Milcinski, “have a slightly different idea behind them. The fact that humanity is sentenced to death and to impermanence is shown by the temple images. They show the entire process of decay of the human corpse, from death to final disintegration. Believers are expected to respond in a prescribed way to the repulsiveness of these pictures.” (4)
We respond in a prescribed way to the violence of an Ishikawa match. We scream in surprise at the initial burst of violence, to show we appreciate the enormous physical stakes. Once they hit to mat to work submission holds, the build is slow and we know to sit at the edge of our seats and let the tension overtake us.
Thus we get through the first ten minutes of Ishikawa’s match against Katsumi Usuda. After being stretched and slapped, Ishikawa sneaks away and gets a butterfly suplex. Usuda won’t stay down though and takes over with a kick to the eardrum. The fight is close to ending three or four times as Usuda presses his advantage, but even when it looks like Ishikawa is dead, that of course is impermanent. Given the tiniest of openings, the guy will move like mercury, heavy and lethal but liquid and fast, to throw right hands. Soon Usuda is bleeding hardway and about to die himself when OH! a desperation armbar counter, but even hope is impermanent and fleeting; Ishikawa escapes and a few lethal strikes and what looks to be a dislocated elbow later, Usuda’s will to live is gone. For now.
Part two a little later in the week.
There’s a span to every life.
One hundred years, thirty-six thousand days:
The spring through, the butterfly dreams.
—Daichi (1290–1366)
All cultures struggle with death and use art to embody and understand these fears. By engaging with representations of the end of life we better understand the temporary, fragile, and enduring value of being mortal.
Japanese shoot-style professional wrestler Yuki Ishikawa is an excellent vehicle for exploring ideas about life’s impermanence, rebirth and making connections with other artistic media exploring these themes. An annihilative force in the ring, Ishikawa’s matches have metaphors and symbols that link them to Asian art about mortality and death, works both historic and contemporary.
This article was inspired by my watching matches while browsing through an issue of the magazine Ars Orientalis. Author, critic and historian Melia Belli was inspired “to bring multiple examples of the Asian arts of death into dialogue with each other. Universally, the arts of death raise questions about their intended audience that are particular to this category of art. Death art may be just as much for the benefit of the living as the deceased.” (1)
In a similar fashion I wanted to cast one of the scariest performers I’ve ever seen, Yui Ishikawa, as the figure of death to explore themes of transience, impermanence and mortality in the context of some Asian art (primarily Japanese, but some Chinese and Cambodian pieces as well) that I found beautiful, illustrative, and evocative.
“All things are born and die over and over again. The cycle of rebirth can be escaped only by eliminating all desire and thus attaining nirvana or enlightenment, the only stable, non-transient state. Such an attitude can also show us how to understand [these selected art pieces] and it also makes it possible to find beauty in its vanishing and to accept the fact that the impermanence and evanescence of everything make everything even more beautiful,” Maja Milcinski writes in her fascinating paper, “Permanence and Death in Sino-Japanese Philosophical Context.” (2) These fundamentally Buddhist tenants have informed Asian art generally, and Japanese art specifically, since the dawn of the religion.
“At various stages of Japanese history it was felt necessary to educate people in confronting the inevitability of corporeal death,” Milcinski says. (3) For purposes of this article we’ll be focusing on works from four times; a Chinese religious text from the Seventh Century, a poem from Japan in the Twelfth Century, a woodblock print from the Japanese “Edo Period” of 1600-1868, and some contemporary pieces by Tomoyo Ihaya.
Japanese representations of death, decay, and mortality are similar to their counterparts in the west but, according to Milcinski, “have a slightly different idea behind them. The fact that humanity is sentenced to death and to impermanence is shown by the temple images. They show the entire process of decay of the human corpse, from death to final disintegration. Believers are expected to respond in a prescribed way to the repulsiveness of these pictures.” (4)
We respond in a prescribed way to the violence of an Ishikawa match. We scream in surprise at the initial burst of violence, to show we appreciate the enormous physical stakes. Once they hit to mat to work submission holds, the build is slow and we know to sit at the edge of our seats and let the tension overtake us.
Thus we get through the first ten minutes of Ishikawa’s match against Katsumi Usuda. After being stretched and slapped, Ishikawa sneaks away and gets a butterfly suplex. Usuda won’t stay down though and takes over with a kick to the eardrum. The fight is close to ending three or four times as Usuda presses his advantage, but even when it looks like Ishikawa is dead, that of course is impermanent. Given the tiniest of openings, the guy will move like mercury, heavy and lethal but liquid and fast, to throw right hands. Soon Usuda is bleeding hardway and about to die himself when OH! a desperation armbar counter, but even hope is impermanent and fleeting; Ishikawa escapes and a few lethal strikes and what looks to be a dislocated elbow later, Usuda’s will to live is gone. For now.
Part two a little later in the week.
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