As his artistic self-education evolved, Asano developed a highly distinctive approach, which included his renowned monochrome and ‘scratching’ techniques, and an abstract style that captured the harshness of nature in a way that was reminiscent of traditional Ukiyo-e prints. This connection to tradition was deliberate, and the concept of Japaneseness (wa, 和) was something that Asano fostered in his art, saying ‘Only the Japanese can create an abstract art that is based on Japanese culture’. However, he was also drawn to Western aesthetic traditions. His father loved Western culture – especially films – and this may have been an early influence. Later, Asano’s closest friend, the avant-garde poet Riichi Noda, introduced him to books on European artists including Klee, Mirò and Kandinsky. Asano’s daughter Yoshiko also recalled the delight her father took in examining books of drawings by Renoir, Monet, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso. Asano travelled to Paris, Rome, Geneva, Milan and Florence between 1972 and 1986. He also exhibited at the International Contemporary Art Fair (FIAC) in Paris in 1978, and studied painting in Vichy that same year.
Asano was fascinated by energy, movement and materials, and by the changing seasons of his local region, which he tried to capture in his work. The most iconic examples of this are his monochrome images of meandering lines (uzumaki-sen). These lines are sometimes vertical, sometimes horizontal, sometimes random, and they can be thin, hard, sharp, vibrant or fluid. They suggest a sense of being in the landscape – the free movement of the wind, the speed and dynamism of light, stone fences, rice fields, forests, crystals or geological strata. Intriguingly, they never entirely fill the canvas.
Asano’s artistic output was characterized by several distinct phases. Before the Pacific War of 1941–45, he produced monochrome designs made with pastels, ink and pencil, but by the 1950s his focus had shifted to darker, more melancholy work, reflecting the post-war mood of the country. These became known as his ‘closed-room paintings’. In 1956, influenced by the Art Informel movement, he embarked on a ‘white period’. After 1972, he mostly produced black oil paintings, and in a final phase, starting in 1988, he focused on black-and-white paintings. Combining Japanese and Western influences with a highly idiosyncratic approach to his craft, Asano played a pivotal role in the development of modern art in Japan, and his legacy continues to act as a bridge between East and West.
