From September 2014 to 2017, I devoted most of my time to a mammoth task: the production of an elaborate comics project named Blokken (“Blocks”), a visual retelling of F. Bordewijk’s 1931 sci-fi novella of the same name. Since only a Dutch language version of Blokken is currently in print, this Journal entry tries to uncover some of Blokken’s content, offering background information about its original author Ferdinand Bordewijk and the work involved to bring his wordy otherworldly vision to life.

F. Bordewijk (1884–1965)

While virtually unknown internationally, Ferdinand Bordewijk (abbreviated to F. Bordewijk on most of his publications) is considered the most influential author of his generation in his native Holland, having received the P.C. Hooft Award in 1953 (Holland’s most prestigious literary lifetime achievement award). Because of his cold-blooded style Bordewijk was frequently associated with the New Objectivity, a movement devoted to stripped down aesthetics and stylistic rigidity. But the striking graphic imagery and magical quality of his stories consistently marked him as a great man of letters. What sets Bordewijk apart from his peers as well as many Dutch authors that followed, is his exotic and highly idiosyncratic phraseology – a modern, minimalist, yet poetic take on the Dutch language known as the ‘Reinforced Concrete’ style. Among the Dutch literary landscape, a flat field devoted mainly to social-realist “kitchen-sinkness”, his early novella Blokken has remained a towering and mysterious monolith.

Various sources of inspiration for Blokken: 1. Theo van Doesburg/Cornelis van Eesteren, Shopping Arcade (1924); 2. Theo van Doesburg/Cornelis van Eesteren, University Hall (1923); 3. Willi Baumeister, Draughtsman and Model (1913); 4. David Bomberg, Study for Vision of Ezekiel (ca. 1912).

Utopia or Dystopia

Central to Blokken is a futuristic and angular cityscape, controlled by a totalitarian system known as The State, a “society of impersonality”. Its dehumanized citizens, all uniform-clad robotic “flat characters”, are mere bystanders in this tragedy of grand proportions. Like the best among the science fiction genre, Blokken is a warning sign screaming “dangerous bends ahead”. Undoubtedly conceived as a parable on dubious political projects, Blokken predicts in horrifying detail the rise of German fascism and its penchant for mass rituals and dehumanization. Nevertheless, the novel remains a timeless air due to its cool aloofness, ruthless abstraction and moral ambiguity. In addition, it deals with current issues such as the surveillance state and the impact of the lack of privacy on its citizens. 

Blokken is a characteristically un-Dutch future vision – apart from Christiaan Huygen’s 18th century interstellar fantasy Cosmotheoros, it’s considered the only true example of Dutch science-fiction with some heft. Although it draws similarities to Brave New World, which Bordewijk dismissed as being “mere trash”, Blokken was published three years ahead of Huxley’s more famous work. However, the world described in Blokken is much more rigid and formal and Bordewijk’s prose seems almost entirely concerned with staccato rhythms and abstraction, betraying a far-reaching influence of De Stijl, the Dutch touchstone of visual and literary modernism.

Selected early sketches for Blokken.

Visualizing The State

Blokken’s The State operates under a motto of absolute efficiency and cleanliness: both key factors of the modernist ideal. Therefore, in visualizing this rigid world I felt it was appropriate to try and take onboard the entire artistic and architectural avant-garde of the twenties and thirties that the book associates itself with. This included the work of Dutch modernist Theo van Doesburg, but also Russian Constructivist projects, some primary examples of the Bauhaus and the British Vorticism movement.

Virtually every element of my visual retelling of Blokken is devoted to the interplay of strict geometry and circular shapes, rigid patterning and organic distortion, perfectly straight compositions and angled disruptions. These fundamental contrasts are reflected in the page lay-outs, inside the comic panels themselves, but also in the graphic design. The pages follow the rules of an unseen, but omnipresent formal grid system and the colours (obviously primaries) shift at regular intervals that coincide with the snaking story arc.

The linnen cover alludes to El Lissitzky's 1922 Constructivist children's book About Two Squares. photo: justina nekrašaite

Blokken – De mislukking van een heilstaat, F. Bordewijk & Viktor Hachmang
Published by Nijgh & Van Ditmar, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, April 2018
Hardcover, 112 pages, ISBN: 978-90-3880-512-2
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In Summer of 2019 I travelled to the town of Arita, located on Kyushu, the Southern island of Japan, to join a three month residency programme, centering on the art of traditional Japanese art of porcelain making. Arita-yaki, as it is known in its native Japan, is considered to be the most high-quality type of porcelain. Unfortunately, the popularity of these highly prized objects is waining.This sparked the Creative Residency Arita programme, inviting Dutch artists and designers to innovate this ancient craft.

My work stems from a deep interest Japanese arts and aesthetics, from the elegant Japanese court art to the frantic pop visions of contemporary manga. Combined with my interest in ornamentation as a means of storytelling, I set out to design objects that bridged the gap between these “high” and “low cultures” and over the course of three months designed decorations that resonate with a Japanese as well as a Dutch audience, trying to connect these two hidden worlds of cultural symbolism.

Arita

Nabeshima ware dishes from the Shibata Collection, Kyushu Ceramic Museum

A new material

In true Japanese fashion, studying a craft is a painstaking process – starting from the absolute bottom and slowly working your way up. To start off my project, I attended a three-week sengaki painting course – the traditional painting of underglaze outlines onto bisqueware. My enthusiastic and patient sensei mrs. Nagao introduced me to basic techniques of porcelain decoration, showing me the way through painting a carousel of traditional geometric patterns. By practicing on small biscuit fired dishes, I got acquainted to the indigo-blue gosu pigment. As Nagao-sensei pointed out to me: “Sengaki painting is not an art. It’s a sport!”

Different stages of the underglaze and overglaze decoration process at Gen-emon. photo: gen-emon kiln

Gen-emon Kiln

Creative Residency Arita put me in contact with Gen-emon Kiln, one of Arita’s most prestigious kilns, renowned for their lush handmade Ko-Imari (“Old Imari”) style ceramics for more than 260 years. Working closely with Gen-emon’s skilled experts (i.e. Gen-emon owner and designer Shoji Kaneko and lead painter Yokota Atsushi), we translated my designs into handmade ceramics of the highest quality.

The Tsuyu series, flat dish and ume ("pear blossom") bowl version. photo: gen-emon kiln

Tsuyu

One of these collaborative works is the Tsuyu series, a range of strictly handmade ceramics inspired by the Japanese rainy season. In Japanese art, it is tradition to infuse illustrations with seasonal references. I wanted to pay hommage to this convention, but experimented with a different way of denoting the seasonal aspect.

This specific design tries to convey the spirit of the Japanese monsoon in sequential form. It is deeply inspired by mid-century manga, even toting comic book screentones (envisioned as Gen-emon’s distinctive plum blossom motif) and manga style onomatopoeia. (Interestingly, the Japanese language employs many different sound effects for specific types of rain!)

Large-scale display dish Intruder. photo: gen-emon kiln

Intruder

The Intruder display dish directly echoes a Nabeshima ware design from the Edo period. It features the auspicious tortoise shell pattern with an intertwined mukade, the ferocious Japanese centipede that is very common on the island of Kyushu. This creature is considered a real life yokai (ghost or monster from Japanese folklore) and is notoriously hard to kill. That’s probably why the mukade came to symbolize evil in Japanese art. However, the mukade is also said to possess gold finding abilities: some say looters kept them as pets to detect abandoned gold mines in the Edo period... Unbeknownst to me at first, the mukade became a symbol of my own experience in Japan along the way: trying to worm my way into Japan’s ancient aesthetics and getting entangled in the process.

Large-scale display dish Thieving Magpies. photo: gen-emon kiln

Thieving Magpies

Thieving Magpies is another large-scale display piece, made in collaboration with Gen-emon Kiln during my residency in Arita, Japan. This design also references a Nabeshima porcelain plate from the Edo period, featuring two magpies – the auspicious symbol of Saga Prefecture. In Western folklore however, the magpie is said to be obsessed with shiny objects, often stealing jewelry and such to adorn its nest.

This design refers to Japanese Kacho-ga (“bird and flower paintings”), poetic scenes from nature featuring seasonal aspects and often having metaphysical meanings.

In Japanese traditional art, nothing is without meaning or purpose. In this vein, the image on this plate suggests casting off earthly desires (such as money, jewelry) and to bask in nature’s glory instead: the eternal shining disk of the moon, the Buddhist symbol of inner enlightenment.

Madori & Tensha

Apart from being known for its impressive hand painted decoration, Arita is also on the forefront of another specialized technique: the production of tensha. Tensha are water-slide decals–porcelain “stickers” screenprinted onto sheets of gummed paper. The starting point for these tesha-based works were madori (“windows”), a distinctive feature of many Arita-yaki pieces. Appearing in a wide variety of shapes, madori are frames that contain graphic elements, patterns or illustrations. Madori are frequently shown in combination with one another, making it a suitable device to tell complex stories within one graphic composition – an anticipation of manga, in my opinion.

The overglaze tensha process

My madori are filled with illustrations based on my direct surroundings in Saga, drawing inspiration from classical themes as well as the everyday, such as supermarket products and roadsigns. The designs of these plates are made using collage techniques: I transposed the production method of my comics (using handcut screen tone foil) onto ceramics. My illustrations were printed onto tensha and rearranged by hand onto the porcelain surface, thus creating unique one-of-a-kind pieces using a technique originally developed for mass production. By freely collaging and combining illustrations, abstract stories enfold, juxtaposing old and new, East and West.