In parallel with the great exhibition “Marino Marini. Visual passions”, set up in Palazzo Fabroni, the Marino Marini Foundation offers a tribute to Kengiro Azuma, who was Marini's pupil and friend.
The story is well known: Kengiro Azuma arrived in Milan from Japan in 1956 by enrolling at the Brera Academy where he first became a pupil and then an assistant to Marino Marini. The human and artistic relationship between them continued throughout their lives, looking at each other's artistic research while each maintaining their own identity. Marino for Azuma was the greatest Master and Marino himself has always pushed his good student to recover the oriental origins.
Azuma's is a story that takes on the dimension of a novel. Born in 1926 in Yamagata into a family of bronze craftsmen, he abandoned his studies at the age of 17 to enlist and fight in the Second World War as a kamikaze pilot in the Japanese army.
Two days before his "sacrificial" mission, the first atomic bomb exploded on Hiroshima.
Once the war is lost, the myth of the God-Emperor has fallen, a period of profound suffering follows for the young Azuma which ends when he decides to approach the figurative arts to fill the void left by the loss of faith in his Emperor.
After graduating in sculpture at the University of Tokyo, with a scholarship he arrives in Milan in 1956, where in Brera he becomes first a pupil and then an assistant to his greatest artistic legend, Marino Marini.
It is from this point of view of human, spiritual and artistic bond that the Marino Marini Foundation dedicates an exhibition to Azuma.
"Works - underlines the curator of the exhibition, Maria Teresa Tosi, director of the Marini Foundation - which with their full and empty spaces express what is truly important in life "that is, the soul, friendship, true solidarity, way of living together".
Azuma's idea – continues Director Tosi – is to represent the invisible part of man, which however does not have a well-defined shape. Feelings don't have a precise form, they are abstract things. "I abandoned the representation of man, dedicating myself to that of the soul", he in fact said"
Speaking of his famous drops of water, sculpted in bronze, also present in this exhibition and forms attributable to him more than any other, Azuma, in an interview, stated: "I made many drops of water in bronze because the drop of water can never be seen perfectly. As soon as the drop detaches itself from the gutter, it takes on a perfect shape which, however, we are unable to grasp with our eyes. I think our life is a bit like this. We will never be perfect men like drops of water, even if we study deeply. I then make holes in the bronze drop. What makes a glass such is not the material with which it is built, but the void that is filled by the drink we pour into it. So I try to express using empty space what is really important, that is the soul, friendship, true solidarity, the way of living together. With my sensitivity I then have to figure out where to put the voids to communicate what I intend to communicate”.
