Newman Huo

    JAPANESE artist Nuit Sano is displaying 15 of her abstract paintings and installations at the He Xiangning Art Museum in Nanshan District until March 20.

    Sano, 79, is the president of the Joshibi University of Art and Design (JUAD) in Tokyo, where late Chinese painter He Xiangning studied between 1909 and 1911.

    “This year is the 111th anniversary of the founding of the JUAD, so we’ve purposefully invited Sano to show her recent abstract paintings at our museum,” said exhibition organizer Fang Hua.

    Sano attended the opening of her exhibition Saturday. The exhibition has a special title “Bleu Nuit,” which the artist says comes directly from the name of a bar in France with the English meaning of “blue night.”

    The color blue is an absolute necessity in Sano’s abstract paintings as the color is both the subject and the theme itself in many of her paintings.

    Sano speaks of blue as a color that “hides so much of what it has to say.” With a palette of color that many people in Japan’s art world have come to refer to as “Sano blue,” the artist creates compositions where surfaces of color interact with a resonance that brings to mind the lively rhythms of jazz improvisation.

    As reflected in the frequent appearance of the word blue in the titles of her works, Sano has continued to use a palette centered around the highly expressive range of blues and bold brushwork to create melodious compositions that ring with a cosmopolitan sophistication of all her own.

    Sano says she creates compositions by looking at lines and shapes, then works them into paintings with shapes and colors which come from nature and people encountered on travels, or sometimes from recollections, and all things that remain in her soul with the passage of time.

    The paintings which emerge from this process are alive with various shapes that spread easily across the entire canvas, filling it with an expansive play of refreshing colors.

    Over transparent blues, lines of yellow and sometimes red run freely and then pause and move again with pleasant rhythms. Those paintings provide audiences with thoughtful moments of repose.

    The exhibition’s highlight includes an installation, titled “A Moving Blue World Map,” which was first shown at the Narita International Airport in Japan on Feb. 26, 2010.

    Sano was born in the town of Hirosaki in Aomori Prefecture in November 1932. She graduated from the oil painting department of the JUAD in 1955, and in the same year had her work selected for the Shinseisaku Exhibition and won an award at the Association of Women Painters Exhibition. After this, she traveled extensively through Europe, the United States and North Africa as she continued her studies.

    Through her series of works such as “Systems of Dark Blue,” “Contracting Areas of Blue,” and “Moving Abstract Maps,” Sano has developed her own sense of color.

    While continuing her career displaying in domestic and international exhibitions, she has taught successive generations of young artists at her alma mater, where she was appointed president in 2007.

    Dates: Until March 20

    Hours: 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Closed Monday

    Venue: He Xiangning Art Museum, Overseas Chinese Town, Nanshan District (南山区华侨城何香凝美术馆)

    Buses: 21, 26, 32, 54, 59, 101, 123, 109, 113, 121, 204, 209, 210, 222, 223, 232, 234, 245, 311, 319, 327, 338, 383, 390, 367, 369, 370, 373

    Metro: Hua Qiao Cheng Station (Overseas Chinese Town Station 华侨城站), Exit C