Zenzaburo Kojima: This very green

This very green, an exhibition of paintings by Zenzaburo Kojima (1893-1961) marks the artist’s first solo exhibition outside of his native Japan and inaugurates Nonaka-Hill, Melrose, located at 6917 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles.

Kojima's wholly unique genre paintings are historic within the development of Western-style painting in Japan known as Yō-ga. Embodying the new globalizing pursuits of Japan’s Meiji and Taisho Eras of his youth, Kojima’s alternately spare and gestural paintings were often painted in plein-air to capture what the artist called ‘eternal life,’ a transcendence from observed reality and the individual’s subjective experience of nature; “The kind of art that we strive to create today must embody the middle way, in which the material and spiritual are merged into one…It must arise from realism (shajitsu) and yet transcend realism.” — Zenzaburo Kojima, 1935

Works for the exhibition, produced between 1930 and 1960, were selected from the Estate of Zenzaburo Kojima in collaboration with artist Hiroshi Sugito, who has incorporated selected Kojima paintings into his solo exhibition “Hiroshi Sugito: the garden” on view concurrently at Nonaka-Hill, Highland.

To honor the 130th anniversary of Zenzaburo Kojima’s birth, the Fukuoka Prefectural Museum of Art will mount a major survey exhibition in 2023. In 2022, the second volume of his catalog raisonné was published by the artist’s grandson, Toshio Kojima. Kojima’s solo exhibitions include the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, traveling to The Annex Museum of the National Museum of Modern Art (1964); Fukuoka Art Museum (1993, 2012); The Shoto Museum of Art (1998); Fuchu Art Museum (2007).

Please also visit:

Hiroshi Sugito
the garden
with Zenzaburo Kojima
at Nonaka-Hill, Highland
720 North Highland Avenue, Los Angeles