Points of Entry

Points of Entry 

The studio in Inglewood always has its doors open. Overhead, planes bound for LAX pass low. When an Emirates Airbus flies over, Pour says, he can tell without looking. His father, who left Iran for England, sold carpets in Exeter. The carpet began as a tool woven in the course of a nomadic life: rolled up and carried, then unrolled to become a floor wherever it came to rest. A floor that moves; a piece of land you can carry with you. The planes overhead and the carpet underfoot: the studio sits between the two. 

Pour began imitating carpets in paint in 2009, after seeing the Safavid Ardabil Carpet at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. What started as imitation gradually began to admit things that had no business being there. The carpet stopped being the subject and became a container. By 2019, in his first solo exhibition in Tokyo, the pattern filling the borders had shifted from Persian arabesque to seigaiha, the cresting wave. “Poly Painting” continues from there. 

At the center of each work is a field, surrounded by a broad border and enclosed at the outer edge: the structure of an “Oriental” carpet. And yet there is not a single thread here. Structure and pattern alike are painted. Nothing at the center claims priority. You can begin looking anywhere, and what sits in a corner and what sits in the middle are given the same weight. Yet what fills the border is seigaiha, asanoha, cloud motifs*1 — “Japanese patterns.” Those patterns, too, came from outside. The wave form of seigaiha is said to have entered Japan by way of the Asian mainland; its prototype has been traced by some to designs in West Asia, while others suggest that similar forms arose independently in several places. Either way, it did not begin in Japan. 

It is not only patterns that have traveled. Names have as well. The carpet underlying this structure is generally called a “Persian carpet,” but that name did not originate in Iran. Persia was the name by which Iran was known in Europe. The same is true of Nihonga,*2 a term that became necessary only after Western painting arrived. A name holds no terroir; it holds the presence of whoever was looking at it from far away. Names come from outside. 

Techniques travel in both directions too. In the eighteenth century, uki-e and Akita ranga adopted linear perspective from Dutch copperplate engravings. The optical theory underlying perspective had been formulated in Arabic by Ibn al-Haytham in the eleventh century and later reached Europe through Latin translation. The foundations of the Western linear perspective that Erwin Panofsky identified as a “symbolic form” had themselves traveled westward across the Mediterranean. A century later, ukiyo-e crossed into Europe and was received there as flatness. When Van Gogh painted his courtesan after a design by Keisai Eisen,*3 what he faced was a form that had already crossed cultural and geographic boundaries more than once. Not influence, but circulation. In a history that never stops moving, the idea of a single origin begins to break down. 

In 1854, when Perry’s fleet rode the Kuroshio*4 into Yokohama,*5 Wilhelm Heine, the expedition’s official artist, drew sumo wrestlers hauling bales of rice; at almost the same moment, Japanese painters were depicting the black ships*6 and the foreigners aboard them. Each was watching the other, and drawing the other. Two images of the same encounter survive, facing in opposite directions. Sakoku*7 belongs to this configuration as well. Closing is also a policy, and Dejima Island, as a site of selective opening, shows that there is no pure “inside” anywhere. The wrestlers locked together inside the drawing let you imagine the mechanics of that crossing. 

Relatively few carpets survive from before the seventeenth century. The history of carpets has therefore been reconstructed from fragments, documents, and, above all, Western paintings in which they appear. The oldest surviving knotted-pile carpet was excavated from a burial mound at Pazyryk in the Altai Mountains. Dating to around the fifth century BCE, the Pazyryk Carpet was restored by inferring its missing sections from the patterns that remained. History works the same way. To write history is to fill what is missing with conjecture. “A carpet is made up of thousands of knots. Think of the knot as a pixel,” Pour says. Working from the pixel end of that analogy, he searches for images and uses AI to repair broken ones. The structure is exactly the same. The only difference is whether the seam is hidden or left visible. In places, the paint has been scraped away and the layer beneath comes through. The surface is not worn; it has been sanded to look worn — a fabrication about the passage of time, made so that you can see it is a fabrication. To leave the act of filling-in exposed: that is the ethics of these paintings, and at the same time their style. 

Running across plains, walking through deserts, riding ocean currents, flying against the westerlies. There is Suminoe port,*8 there is Dejima Island, there is Yokohama port, there is the airport. Each time the route and its point of entry change, so too do who finds whom and who gives whom a name. These are a few of those points of entry. 

Wilhelm von Bode laid the foundations of Berlin’s museum of Islamic art in the early twentieth century. He first experienced the harmony between Oriental carpets and Western painting in Italian churches, and later placed “Persian carpets” alongside Western art in his displays as a fusion of East and West. What Pour paints is not a fusion of East and West. East and West are, rather, lines drawn after the traffic was already underway. Standing before these paintings, we cannot remain on one side or the other either. A picture in which everything is visible at once appears to promise a view from nowhere. But there is no such place. We look from inside, and are named from outside. The work occupies that position. 

Notes 

1. 青海波（seigaiha pattern）, “blue sea waves,” overlapping concentric arcs; 麻の葉（asanoha）, “hemp leaf,” a hexagonal lattice resolving into a six-pointed star; and stylised cloud forms — all standard motifs in Japanese textile and print design.
2. 日本画（Nihonga）, painting in traditional materials, is a Meiji-era coinage that exists only against 洋画（yōga）, painting in the Western manner. Two eighteenth-century predecessors follow below: 浮絵（uki-e）, prints composed around a single vanishing point, and 秋田蘭画（Akita ranga）, a short-lived school applying Dutch shading and perspective to Japanese subjects.
3. 渓斎英泉（1790–1848）, ukiyo-e designer. Van Gogh worked from a cover reproduction in Paris Illustré, May 1886, not from the print itself.
4. 黒潮（Kuroshio）, the “Black Current”: the warm current running north-east along the Pacific side of the archipelago.
5. A fishing village on Edo Bay in 1854; opened as a treaty port in 1859 and thereafter the principal channel for foreign trade and residence.
6. 黒船（kurofune）, “black ships”: the Japanese name for Perry’s steam frigates.
7. 鎖国（sakoku）, “closed country”: the Tokugawa policy restricting foreign contact, in force from the 1630s to 1854. 出島（Dejima）, the artificial island in Nagasaki harbour, was its single licensed opening, reserved for Dutch trade.
8. 住吉（Suminoe）, the ancient harbour on Osaka Bay beside the Sumiyoshi Shrine, from which the envoys to Sui and Tang China set out.

Refarences:
Marta Gnyp, Kour Pour (Skira, Torino, 2019).
Yukari Takuma, “‘Perusia jūtan’ ni miru orientozō no hen’yō: Viruherumu nisei-ki Doitsu ni okeru jūtan no shōnin, kenkyūka, shūshūka no sansha kankei o chūshin to shite” (“The Transformation of the Image of the Orient as Seen in the ‘Persian Carpet’: Focusing on the Tripartite Relationship among Carpet Dealers, Scholars, and Collectors in Wilhelmine Germany”) (2017).
Urara Tamura, Toruko jūtan ga orinasu shakai seikatsu: gurōbaru ni ryūtsū suru mono o meguru minzokushi (The Social Life Woven by Turkish Carpets: An Ethnography of a Globally Circulating Object) (Sekaishisōsha, 2013).
Wilhelm von Bode, Mein Leben, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1930).
Yūichi Satō, “Ikutsuka no hisoka de hi-imiteki na deai” (“Several Secret and Asignifying Encounters”), Bulletin of the Institute of Humanities, Ritsumeikan University, no. 118 (2019).
Jude Stewart, Patternalia: An Unconventional History of Polka Dots, Stripes, Plaid, Camouflage, & Other Graphic Patterns (2015), trans. Yuiko Hosoya as Moyō to imi no hon (Film Art, 2016).