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Thomsen Gallery is pleased to present our second online viewing room, dedicated to paintings by Minol Araki (1928-2010), whose works we exhibited in our New York gallery in 2012 and 2015.
Minol Araki: Nature in Ink presents mature paintings by an artist who was devoted to creating art for its own sake. Araki, by profession an industrial designer, rarely exhibited during his lifetime and was an unusual twentieth-century adherent to the Chinese and Japanese literati tradition which regarded artists as intellectuals. The exhibition presents 25 paintings of elements of nature, showing Araki’s masterful use of ink and his influences from China, Japan and the West.
Araki's works are in the permanent collections of 19 museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.
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Minol Araki (1928-2010)
Artist Biography
1928 Born in Dairen, Manchuria, China, to Japanese parents
1935 Began studying brush painting with a local Chinese painter
1945 Studied architecture at Nanman Kōsen (Southern Manchuria Technical College) in Dairen
1945 Repatriated with his family to Japan, settling in Nagasaki
1947 Resumed studies at Kuwazawa Design School, Tokyo
1959 Started his first company, NOL Industrial Design, in Japan
1960s Extensive travel to Europe, the United States, and Mexico
1960s Started his second company, PIPa Corp., in the United States
1973 First meeting with Chang Dai-chien in Taipei
1977 Solo exhibition, Hong Kong City Hall Museum
1978 Solo exhibition, National Museum of History, Taipei
1980 Solo exhibition, National Museum of History, Taipei
1981 Solo exhibition, Hong Kong City Hall Museum
1982 Group exhibition: “Shigen-ten,” Tokyo Central Museum
1982 Group exhibition: Eighth “Exposition France-Japon,” Paris
1983 Group exhibition: Ninth “Exposition France-Japon,” Paris
1999 Solo exhibition, National Museum of History, Taipei
1999 Solo exhibition, Hong Kong Arts Centre
1999 Solo exhibition, Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ
2001 Group exhibition, Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena, CA
2002 Solo exhibition, Morikami Museum, Delray Beach, FL
2002 Solo exhibition, Indianapolis Art Museum, Indianapolis, IN
2002 Solo exhibition, Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture, Hanford, CA
2005 First gallery exhibition, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
2007 Second gallery exhibition, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
2010 Died in Tokyo
2012 Solo exhibition, Erik Thomsen Gallery, New York
2015 Solo exhibition, Erik Thomsen Gallery, New York
2017 Retrospective exhibition, Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN
2020 Solo online exhibition, Thomsen Gallery, New York
Public Collections Include
Art Institute of Chicago
Asian Art Museum, San Francisco
Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture, Hanford CA
Cleveland Art Museum
Denver Art Museum
Hong Kong Museum of Art
Indianapolis Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Morikami Museum, Delray Beach FL
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
National Museum of History, Taipei
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Phoenix Art Museum
Saint Louis Art Museum
San Antonio Art Museum
USC Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena CA
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven CT
Minol Araki was born in Japanese-occupied Manchuria in 1928 to Japanese parents. As a child in China, he trained in traditional Chinese painting, but he turned his attention to graphic and industrial design after he was repatriated to Japan at the end of World War II. In Tokyo in the 1950s and early 60s, he studied with Japan’s leading modernist designers and associated with the postwar Tokyo avant-garde. A successful designer, Araki went on to establish a network of design studios in the 1960s, work that took him to cities throughout Asia and North America. In his forties, he first met and took as his painting mentor Zhang Daqian (1899–1983), considered the preeminent Chinese traditionalist painter of the modern age. Araki’s creative zenith came after Zhang’s death in 1983; over the following decade he created five monumental paintings that both demonstrate his mastery of Zhang’s trademark techniques and signal a shift toward modern Japanese painting techniques, an interest explored most fully in the last decade of his life. Araki’s work was exhibited at galleries in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Santa Fe, and New York, and in a traveling exhibition at the National Museum of History in Taipei, Taiwan, and the Phoenix Art Museum in 1999.
Paintings by Minol Araki: Nature in Ink
Past viewing_room
