"Chaotic Attractors"

To try and link Toshiko Nishikawa's ethnicity and her aesthetics may very well be a red herring in contemporary times. Yes, indeed, traditional Japanese art is very much about minimalism, silence, stillness, and subtlety - or at least that's a facet, and the one most often exploited as stereotype. To try and link Nishikawa causally though, as some timeslice in a temporal succession, constrains the way we can understand her art - excising from the discussion, for example, abstract expressionism - and unnecessarily boxes in the discussion.

Rather, it's important to see that the minimalism in her White pieces isn't merely a descendent of Noh Theater and action painting, but instead has definite roots in postmodern minimalism, that is, minimalism that builds wide-ranging entanglements out of the interaction of simple pieces. The composition of these artworks creates a dizzying kind of feeling from the massive trail of movement of the lines. This minimalism is the minimalism of complexity theory: the paintings are like chaotic attractors, where constituents of a dynamic system are constantly in play and never repeat the same movement exactly.

-Andrew Beckerman