Exhibit of Japanese batiks at MassArt has an uneven texture
''Rozome" is the Japanese term for the method of dyeing cloth that Westerners know as ''batik" -- molten wax applied to fabric to block whatever else is applied in the way of color.
''Rozome Masters of Japan," a traveling exhibition making its debut at the Massachusetts College of Art, is a legacy of the World Batik Conference held at Mass-Art earlier this month. This first group show in North America dedicated to rozome has brought together works by 15 of Japan's best-known batik artists. They've filled the enormous balconied space of MassArt's Paine Gallery with 31 large pieces whose imagery veers from traditional subjects of Japanese art -- lotus ponds, misty mountains, seas with froth-edged waves -- to odd juxtapositions that to Western eyes will automatically say ''Surrealism."
The mastery of the artists is indisputable, but the results are an odd, uneven mix. The figurative work, especially, shares the stilted, pained literalness of much contemporary figuration in other countries. Some of the abstract pieces are derivative of Western styles, which dilutes their impact.
Contemporary rozome is reaching beyond its principal use in the past -- in fabrics for kimonos -- and the show's catalog calls that a good thing, a sign of progress and a move away from craft into the realm of fine art. But the kimonos in the show are among the strongest pieces. Their non-rectilinear outlines and the three-dimensionality of the billowing fabrics give them an animation lacking in some of the flat rectangular works.
Tadayoshi Yamamoto's ''Glory of the Tree" kimono is a stunning example, the form of the garment and the pattern of the cloth merging in total harmony. A golden triangle rises from a field of vegetation at the bottom, exploding at the top into an extremely intricate tree whose blood-red branches look like capillaries.
Other than the kimonos, the show's only work presented in 3-D is Fukumoto Shigeki's intriguing ''Sanko: Three Lights," a trio of freestanding folding screens that you must walk around to absorb fully. Their individual titles -- ''Sun Beam," ''Moon Light," and ''Star Dust" -- hint at Shigeki's love of light. Luminous bursts of color, largely blues and violets, occupy one side of each screen. But the edges, made of tiny horizontal stripes, anticipate what's to come on the other side: a total breakdown of color into tens of thousands of tiny cloth chips that Shigeki has applied by hand. The work doesn't make you focus on how labor-intensive it is, though, and that's what removes it from the craft world. You focus instead on the sheer beauty of the two complementary styles Shigeki has incorporated into this one masterpiece. And it's gratifying that you can read the work in two ways: Either the color chips are the start of a narrative than ends in the glow of the other side, or the reverse.
''Sanko: Three Lights" stands unprotected by glass. It's not even roped off. Unlike the other artists in the show, whose works are hung on the wall under glass, Shigeki is less concerned with preservation than with the quality of the viewer's experience. There's a poetic wistfulness in his acceptance that his work has a finite life.
The MassArt show's finest example of the Surrealist branch of rozome is Kageo Miura's ''Poem of the Root Vegetables." (I wish this particular title hadn't been translated; it comes across as humorous, which the work is not.) Miura has been working in rozome for 60 years, and he is one of its greatest champions.
In the upper half of ''Poem," abstracted turnips and other veggies liberated from the earth fly against a dark background. Below them, against a gold ground, is an array of tiny geometric shapes that suggest objects including a staircase to nowhere that is as surreal as the floating cabbage on the work's far left.
For the last couple of decades, many young Japanese artists have rebelled against the spare, serene stereotype associated with their country's art, creating a deliberately garish, neo-Pop alternative. But there's also a big retro-Pop movement in Japan and elsewhere at the moment, and rozome artist Midori Abe is part of it. Here, her hyperactive floral pieces in shrieking hues are crisscrossed by images of feathers that appear buoyed by air currents. It's not an aesthetic to everyone's taste, but it's one with its own integrity.
This show was organized by batik expert Betsy Sterling Benjamin, who is also one of the contributors to the obfuscating catalog. Among the book's several flaws are its self-contradictions. On one page you read that Japanese children grow up learning rozome in school, while on another you read that none of the artists in the show is young, and so the survival of rozome is uncertain. The catalog doesn't actually say how old they are, although it does give their addresses. You could write them and ask.
"Rozome Masters of Japan" is at the Paine Gallery of the Massachusetts College of Art, through Sept. 21. 617-879-7333, www.massart.edu/batik.
