Nobuko (like Sadako, Kumiko or Chihiro) could well be the name of one Kawabata’s literary heroines, or the star of a film by Mizoguchi (also Ozu), that is to say, women of a paper-like appearance (little origami figures), gifted with moral determination and strength of spirit, something which is impossible to find in the bodies of their male congeners, as they are much more robust and voluminous. In fact, this Nobuko is used to living with all kinds of paradoxes and apparent dualities, such as trying to harmonise the geographic origin of each individual (where one is from) and the place where the existence passes and what you are forced to deal with on a daily basis (where one is): while the first of these two poles is usually much more remote, often symbolic and sometimes even a fantasy (because it is unknown); the capacity for questioning (or for determining) the indisputable reality of the second pole is enormous.
Projected in it, retrospectively, is a deep desire to build an identity that identifies origin with a non-negotiable foundation. Only those who are truly stateless (totally unrelated to ‘world citizens’ or indefinable things like that) enjoy a happy uncertainty stemming from being from nowhere and, at the same time, a little bit from everywhere...
Nobuko Kihira is truly Japanese but she is also Catalan: next to Gustau Carbó Berthold (and through the art gallery Marges-U) she has been building a fertile social and artistic life in Cadaqués, which flourishes, with subtlety, in her work: one can track in it what can be attributed to Japanese sensibility (the shedding of Zen and so on) perfectly combined with the apparent rudeness of our Western eyes (if ‘Western’ still means anything). Nobuko Kihira is irrefutable evidence of the absurdity of drawing borders in art, something which can be understood if we look at many artists here who have an Eastern appearance and, conversely, many examples of obtuse and overwhelming art existing there: this must be the friendly face of globalisation.
In Cadaqués, the artist works in the basement of the gallery, which she runs herself along with Carbó Berthold: it is a kind of hideout with a cave-like appearance that leads to a wild garden where forms and materials are questioned, with alchemy, like the papers that have become the essence itself of the speech of Kuwana’s author. Because, whatever it is that she does, Nobuko Kihira is a creative artist with a tight bond with paper: she finds her way in paper and she speaks to it when she paints, as if asking permission, in a dialogue that can only be whispered. Perhaps this is why her works have the ability to pass ‘unnoticed’, thanks to the honesty of a plastic gesture which is articulated, programmatically, in the opposite direction of stridency. Quite reluctant to explain her work, this Empordà artist asserts herself in the doubt: My friends have always recommended that I should purify my work even more, but I just do to what I feel at the time, compelled by doubt rather than by conviction. Nonetheless, one cannot help thinking that if she becomes any more minimal perhaps she will end up becoming invisible. Invisible, for example, like the sea breeze that makes the Japanese papers around her studio dance.//
