Koh Shimizu - Coolness (涼)

Seen from directly above, a shallow pool of water fills the entire square panel, and eight goldfish of different varieties drift across it. Koh Shimizu separates each fish by breed rather than repeating a single form: a calico ryukin, a black demekin with protruding eyes, orange and white ryukin, and a brown-mottled wakin all move on slightly different planes of depth. Beneath them, soft grey shadows fall on the pale bed of the pool, so the viewer reads the water not by painting the water itself but by the distance between each fish and its own shadow. The surface is worked in fine, restless ripple lines over a silver-toned mineral ground that shifts as the light moves across it, giving the picture a faint metallic shimmer in person that photographs only partly capture. Against this cool grey the vermilion and orange of the fish read as the only warm accents, and the tension between them is the subject of the work: the title translates as coolness, the sensation of relief that summer water gives. Shimizu has built his career on exactly this problem, the rendering of light and transparency on a water surface, and this small square panel is a concentrated example of it. The work is unsigned in brush but carries the artist's red seal impressed at the lower right, and it is presented in its original box-style frame with a deep grey-green fabric face and a silver inner liner.